Whether you are searching for yourself or for a client, your time is the most valuable resource you manage, and time and money are the major considerations in how you decide which tools to use. One method is to start on the Web and pick off what she calls "low hanging fruit" - the obvious information you can find with quick searches of news articles and keyword searching. If you ask yourself what is the source of the information or who is putting out the information, you will often find that you can get free information from advocacy groups, government agencies, and company press releases. If you want high-value search tools that enable you to limit your sets, do field searching, limit by date and limit by language, then the tools you need will usually be feebased tools.
Where the fee-based tools really shine is in the value-added information they provide. For example, if you want to search the Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR database to get background information about a company, you can do it for free. If you are doing a quick lookup of information, then you can find most of what you need for free on the Web. Same goes for a few articles on the topic. If you are looking for the comprehensive guide or doing what researchers like Mary Ellen Bates call the "scorched earth" search, then you will need to use a combination of free and fee-based tools, and use them several times.
If you are looking for news archives, many news-based websites will provide a few weeks for free. For more obscure or specialized trade publications, or anything more than six months back, you will have to use a fee-based database. If language is the determining factor, then you are best to use a free web-based tool if you are fluent in that language. If you need it abstracted into English, then a fee-based tool is probably your best bet.
Bates suggests a few tips for determining how best to research using fee and free web-based tools. First, work from a checklist of formats like articles, white papers, statistics, and company websites. Then, use the Web to identify ambiguities and help pin down the exact words, phrases, and parameters to do your fee-based search for the high-value material. Then, she suggests doing an additional web search to double check for anything you may have missed the first time around. Then you should be ready to search effectively in fee-based tools.
Every company has a different fee structure. Some charge you for everything you download. Most of them have dropped the charges for your time online, charging a flat fee instead. Some charge for every document you look at. Where you get a significant advantage is that the search engines on these tools are extremely robust and powerful - better than almost anything you find on the Web. Fee-based search tools allow you to conduct more precise searches. These tools also help you focus your results through their built-in refining techniques. They often offer material that is unique and not found on the Web, things like market research, doctoral theses and scholarly journals.
Fee-based services also allow you much more flexibility in defining your search. They provide a quality screening mechanism, determining where the valuable resources might be found, centralizing them, and letting you know where the resources are from. Fee-based services allow you to scour large numbers of resources simultaneously and run your search in one shot. The tradeoff, as always, is time versus money. You spend more money to get an answer with a fee-based service, but you save time in the process.
On fee-based services, the structure of each database can be different, so if you are searching more than one database at a time, be careful to switch rules of operation when you switch databases. Even if you are searching on the same fee-based service, this happens.
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Note: This article was sent to us by: Greg Walder at 08282010
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