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Summary posted by Susan Hahn, University of Oklahoma, on October 2, 1997

Buslibbers --

A couple of weeks ago I ask you to compare L/N and DIALOG, and to make it interesting I tossed in Dow Jones.

Here is a summary of the responses:

• most of you have used all three, corporate librarians prefer Dialog and Academic librarians L/N
• one response stated they found DIALOG and L/N had an 80% overlap rate of titles held
• despite all the problems encountered very few would get up access to all three

ON the up side

DIALOG :

• still my favorite because of the major business new files and its cross searchable you can specify a particular journal, date. company name, country...
• anything under the sun you'll find in dialog
• I'd go with dialog every time
• great for its coverage, printing options
• serves a need for a wide variety of American based information and
• it is expanding its coverage into the Asian/Pacific region

L/N :

• great for its inclusiveness, strengths in news coverage, and public records and business filings.
• can be cost effective
• cannot be matched by content, price ease of access of comprehensiveness
• there are some good d-bases available but they're not worth the trouble and expense
• I have been using L/N web and have been very pleased. It is mostly menu based but can still perform boolean. I was able to pull up a number of company reports

DOW Jones :

• the best for financial or business oriented uses
• it has unique newspapers and journals
• very user friendly and reasonably priced
• would be the best bet of the three, great for real-time financial information coupled with full text trade and newspapers sources.
• our students find it easy to use and it's excellent for financial analysis and company research

On the down side

DIALOG:

• in order to access the strong search features you must become an expert searcher.Not good for end users
• wonderful product if you intend to purchase for searching by professional librarians

L/N:

• usually going to cost more that dialog for an average search
• I don't like search engine at all
• very expensive
• very difficult to use, we have both windows and DOS, and requires significant patron instruction. It is not intuitive
• I despise L/N, also find costumer service deplorable at best
• It expensive, difficult to use, and results have always been disappointing. I find to difficult to specify fields. If you make a typo and have to re-enter a search you get charged

Dow Jones:

• I find dj the least user friendly, least cost effective and has the narrowest scope

* to protect the innocent all names have been left off

The source you choose depends somewhat on the type of person you are, i.e. (do you enjoy looking for information on a User Friendly and relatively simple data base (Lexis-Nexis) or do you enjoy getting into the nuts and bolts of "detailed" searching commands and options which skills can take months or years to develop through much training (Dialog)). It also depends greatly on your customer base and what kind of information they are looking for. We find Lexis-Nexis to be extremely user friendly and inexpensive using the FLAT RATE. You get a monthly charge and can search at your hearts content without getting additional charges until you print. You can pull full formats up on the screen and read all day long with no additional charge. You can pull KWIC format or you can pull any amount of words around your search words that you want so that you can make sense out of the content of the document. With Dialog, you can pull KWIC which tells you very little and what is extremely frustrating when you pull KWIC format, it doesn't allow you to see the Date of the document. So if you see information that looks like a Hit, you can bring it up in full format only to find it is information back from 1982 and you don't want it that far back, then you are getting hit for charges for KWIC and also for FULL format and only to find out you can't use that information. You can limit your search with a date, that is if that particular file has that option, not all files have all the same options. The most frustrating feature about DIALOG is that all files are different in their search commands and you need two huge binders to refer to in order to get through a search. The other part about DIALOG that is frustrating is that you get charged for every minute you're breathing while logged on, including using the "pause" feature. DIALOG's primary reason for being is $$$$$. Well, that is my version of the comparisons of the two data bases, there are other pluses and minuses in both data bases, but there is not enough room here to pursue. I wish you well in your choice.

-- Phyllis Meade, Acquisition/Performance Engineering

To my mind, there's no choice between these two services - I'd go with Dialog every time. I have access to both, but haven't even used L/N for the last year or so. It's very expensive, difficult to use and results have always been disappointing. They charge anything from $20 - $40 just to type in a search statement. If you make a typo and have to re-enter the statement, you get charged again. This is all before you even get a list of hits. I find it very difficult to specify fields to search in L/N, which means you get a lot of irrelevant hits and spend a lot of unnecessary time and money wading through all the extra material. With Dialog you can specify a particular journal, date, company name, country name, etc. With ease. The documentation and support for Dialog is also far superior than L/N. I know a few people who use L/N, but most of the librarians I know here in Toronto choose Dialog over L/N every time.

There are some good databases available through L/N, but as far as I'm concerned they're not worth the trouble and expense to use them.

Have you considered Dow Jones at all? We also use them a lot here. They're very user-friendly and reasonably priced. I tend to use Dialog as my first choice, but my colleague almost always uses Dow Jones.

Hope this helps.

-- Lynda Bond, Ontario Ministry of Economic Development, Trade and Tourism

The two resources are not really at all alike. Dialog has a vast array of information that is not on Lexis/Nexis and is much cheaper for a lot of things - like newspaper searches, company profiles, international company information. Lexis/Nexis is geared to 1) law firms for the cases and statutes for U.S. and selected other countries (usually Commonwealth countries) or 2) to doing newspaper searches and company searches at a very expensive rate - both U.S. and international.

Most business libraries would be better off with Dialog. I am in a situation where I have both and use Lexis/Nexis as a second choice only if the answer isn't found on Dialog. Dialog is always much, much cheaper - on & off for a newspaper search at a cost of $5-$10 when just the initial search would cost anywhere from $20-$50 on Lexis/Nexis.

One other consideration is also who will be using the service. Dialog is still rather archaic in its search language - not much has changed from the 1970s. Lexis/Nexis is aimed at the less proficient user so the searching is a little more straightforward. There have been some softwares developed to make Dialog more user friendly - I find they often reduce the flexibility as well and don't use them but my assistant who is an infrequent user likes the CustomDialog software.

Hope you get other responses that help make the decision easier. Please feel free to e-mail back any specific questions.

-- Barbara Folensbee-Moore, Pepper Hamilton & Scheetz

Personally, I have a preference for Dow Jones, because we gear both Lexis and DJNR to being used by trained end users in our company (we use both in our Information Centers). For what our end users need, DJNR gives it to them in an easily understood and used format and does not require them to learn a searching language. DJNR also has significantly more full text publications online (I believe the ratio is 85% full text in DJNR to 60% ish in Lexis). For the specialized databases, such as D&B, we use Dialog (although again, this is available in Dow Jones); for Investext we actually use direct access through I/Plus (this is only available through our Information Center however) And yes, the pricing structure for Dow Jones is a lot more flexible and cheaper as well. One other thing which makes me prefer Dow Jones is their customer service, which I have found to be excellent both for users and on the management end that I am on. I have found Lexis to be very unresponsive and difficult to work with (they have not demo-ed new software/products in our company in over a year now!)

This is just one point of view however. I can see where, depending on what your need is for each product, you might prefer Lexis to Dow Jones. But if you're just looking for the text sources, I say Dow Jones is the way to go.

-- Jennifer Brock, CSC Index

I have experienced the Dow Jones Interactive error on several occasions. ("we are unable to process your request at this time.") I have not addressed it, but I have noticed it is happening more frequently, especially in the last month.

I had not been able to determine if this was an "in-house" or external problem.   Since it only affected me for 5 or 10 minutes a day, I hadn't bothered to complain to their customer service department. Perhaps it's worth calling in now, as it appears to be system-wide.

-- Karen Weber, BSMG Worldwide

In addition to the two people who've written back over the list, I've heard from about ten people privately about their travails with Dow Jones Interactive.  Two were able to search again by going back to 5.0 (didn't work for us), I think only one has been able to make it work with the newer software.  We have installed 6.1b, which hasn't helped. The latest software that came in the mail may have a fix, but that seems to be a network version, with *older* search software.

My favorite story is about the error happening to some DJ reps, while performing a demo for a downtowner's group. Incidentally, these problems have hastened some people's defection from DJ in favor of alternative vendors. I hope that they are duly concerned.

I really liked the 5.0 software when it came out, but the entire 6.x series has been buggy from the get-go.  I suspect that it is proving difficult to sustain development efforts for both this platform and for the web platform, and the proprietary search software is suffering.

-- Alice Klingener, American Express Financial Advisors