Step D: Factiva

Introduction
Factiva, our largest database, is a global collection of over 10,000 sources in 22 languages from over 118 countries. Included in the sources are newswires, national and regional newspapers, magazines, journals (including trade journals), web sites, company reports, and media transcripts. Factiva's emphasis is on business and industry; in fact, its stated goal is to "help you make better business decisions..." On the other hand, Factiva contains a broad spectrum of periodicals in areas other than business, which makes it useful for research in the kind of topics chosen by English 111 students.

The many newspapers for which Factiva provides full-text articles include The Roanoke Times, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and The Wall Street Journal. The starting date for full-text coverage will vary from newspaper to newspaper. For example, full-text coverage for The Wall Street Journal starts in 1984 with abstracts going back to 1979. With abstracts you do not get the full article, only a summary. As another example, for The Roanoke Times you get full-text coverage back to 1990, but it only includes locally written articles.

Factiva FYI!

• Factiva will time out after a short period of inactivity. To log back in, you must return to the Brown Library home page and click on Factiva again.
• In Factiva you can't use the back button to return to the Brown Library home page. Instead, click the down arrow next to the back button. This will bring up a history of recently visited sites. Choose “VWCC - Brown Library” to get back home. (If you are doing research on a computer in the library, you can return by clicking the Home button.)
• Factiva does not work with any version of Netscape or AOL. Click here for more information about browser support.

Home Screen
To reach Factiva, click on "Databases" on the library’s home page, then click on Factiva. This is the first Factiva screen that you see.

At the top of the screen is the Free Text search box. Next to it is the green Run Search button.

Below the search box is the date box. You can specify “All Dates” or limit your search to dates within a time period, such as the last six months, or limit your search to dates within a particular time range, such as April to May 2007.

Below the date box is a box labeled Select Sources and Factiva Intelligent Indexing. In this box you can choose to limit your search to a particular company, source, subject, industry, region, or language. In most cases you will not need these options to complete the library worksheet. However, if you are covering a topic specific to an area, such as Roanoke, or a company, such as Wal-Mart, see the paragraph on advanced searching at the bottom of this page.

Below the Select Sources box is another group of search options. You can limit your search to Full Article, Headline, Headline and Lead Paragraph, or Author. The default choice is Headline and Lead Paragraph. Below that option you can also limit your search by excluding obituaries, calendars, market data, or republished news. Below that you have the sort box. You can sort by relevance or by publication date. If you sort by publication date, you can ask for oldest results first or newest results first. Usually, it is more useful to sort by relevance or to sort by newest date.

Free Text Search
In the book catalog we used the Keywords Anywhere search. In Gale we used the Basic or Quick search. Here, we use the Free Text search. With this search, you are looking for your search words to appear anywhere in the article. This means that some of the results you get may not be relevant. The articles you find might not have anything to do with your topic.

Type animal rights in the search box. Look at the date box and make sure All Dates is selected.  Make sure that the sort box at the bottom of the screen is set to sort by Relevance. Then click on Run Search.

Search Results Screen

The next screen is the search results screen. In the top left corner you see three folder tabs. They are Publications, Web News, and Pictures. The first tab is gray, the other two are white. The gray tab, which is Publications, is the one currently selected. In this group you will see a mix of newspapers, newswires, and magazines. However, most of the articles will be from newspapers. Below the folder tabs is the sort box. Below that, you see a group of pictures that we will discuss shortly. Below the pictures you can see that the number of articles found is 131,731 On the first screen you can scroll down through a list of the first 100 articles. To bring up the next list of 100, click on the blue arrow. The headlines or titles are highlighted in blue. Underneath the headline is the newspaper or other source, the date, the number of words in the article, and the first few lines of the article.

This search found too many results to be useful to us. So we will return to the search screen and try a new search by subject.

Descriptor Search
In most library databases we have subject searching. In Factiva we have descriptor searching. Unlike the Free Text search, when you search by descriptor you know that every article you find is about your topic. To do a descriptor search you must know the right search command. There is no menu box to guide you. The search command is de=. So to search for animal rights as the subject the search is de=animal rights. DE stands for descriptor. 

To search by descriptor, it is not enough to enter the de= command. You must also change your search options. Move down to the search options area where you see "Search for free-text terms." Next to that, you see a drop down menu box. In the box, the default is Headline and Lead Paragraph. For the descriptor search, and for any command search, you must change this option to Full Article. Let's make that choice now, to complete our search for de=animal rights. Prior to executing the search, then, our screen looks like this:

When we search again we find 3,679 results.

 All of these articles are about animal rights. We will look at at one.

Full Article View

On this screen you see a full-text article about animal rights. This is a good article so let’s save it to use for our paper. Note the images right above the article. There is a picture of an envelope, a printer, and a floppy disk. You can email the article to yourself, print the article, or save it to a disk. These are all standard options in most library databases. Let’s print the article. You already know about printing from the file menu or the tool bar when using the Internet or Microsoft Word. When you use the library databases, you usually don't want to print that way. Instead, you want to format your article for printing. Usually you will see a little picture of a printer. Here you do. Click on the printer, which reformats the article for printing, then use the file menu to print. 

MLA Citations
At the top of this article, you find all the information you need to construct an MLA style citation. There are ten pieces of information. The first five pieces are for the print source. The last five pieces are for the electronic source. Please note that this example is for a newspaper article. For journal and magazine articles, citations are a little different. Please consult page 386 of A Writer's Reference, ^6th ed. for more information.

print information

1. Author -The author of this article is Jodie Minus. Write it like this: Minus, Jodie. Sometimes an article will not have an author. That is okay. You can still use the article. When there is no author, you start the citation with the article title.
2. Title - The title of this article is "Putting Bite into Animal Rights." Notice that on the screen the title words do not all start with capital letters. This is not MLA style. For MLA style always capitalize the first letter of every word in a title except for articles and prepositions.
3. Source - The source of this article is Illawara Mercury. Write it like this: Illawarra Mercury.  In Factiva, you can always find the name of the source highlighted in blue.
4. Date - The date of this article is May 4, 2007. Write it like this: 4 May 2007. In Factiva, you can always find the date directly above the source name. The date is always written in reverse order. Abbreviate all month names with more than four letters. For example, spell out June, but abbreviate April as Apr.
5. Page number - The page of this article is 9. Write it like this: 9. In Factiva, you can always find the page number directly underneath the source name. For newswires you will not have a page number.

electronic information

1. Database - The database name is Factiva. Write it like this: Factiva.
2. Database vendor - The database vendor is Dow Jones.
3. Place of access - The place of access is Brown Lib., Virginia Western Comm. Coll., Roanoke. This is true even when you are doing research from home.
4. Date of access - The date of access is the date on which you looked up the information. Again, the date is written in reverse order.
5. Database address - The web address is http://global.factiva.com. Notice we are using a modified short form of the web address, which is not the same as what you see at the top of the screen.

Advanced Searching
There are two ways to use advanced searching to limit your results. One way is to use Select Sources and Factiva Intelligent Indexing. Another way is through the use of command language. In a command search you have to understand the use of code words such as de=, sn=, and fds=. We already learned that we use de= for a descriptor search. Now we learn that sn stands for source name and fds stands for company symbol. To do a source search for animal rights in The Roanoke Times use this search: animal rights and sn=Roanoke.

The company search is a little more difficult. To do a company search you must know the company symbol. To find this symbol you use the Select Sources and Factiva Intelligent Indexing search. Click on the plus sign (+) next to the word “Company” and a search box will appear.

Type in a company name, such as "wal-mart." In this example, a list of three companies appears.

If we are not sure which company we want, we can click on the letter “i“ next to the company and see more information about it. We will do that for the company named Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

We go ahead and choose this company. Click on the up arrow to add it to the free-text search box at the top of the screen. Notice that it adds the command search fds=wlmrt. The company symbol is wlmrt.

To complete the search, we will look for articles about Wal-Mart in The Roanoke Times. The search is: sn=roanoke and fds=wlmrt.

We find 150 articles in the Roanoke Times about Wal-Mart.

English 111 Assignment
For Step E, find one full-text article in Factiva about your topic and make an MLA style citation for it. It is okay to use articles from newswires, but do not use abstracts. Abstracts are not full-text articles.  Here is a sample citation from the descriptor (subject) search on animal rights:

Minus, Jodie. “Putting Bite into Animal Rights.” Illawarra Mercury 4 May 2007:9. Factiva. Dow Jones. Virginia Western Community Coll., Brown Lib., Roanoke. 23 July 2007 <http://global.factiva.com>.