Home > Press Releases > News Products from Factiva, LexisNexis and Thomson Compared

News Products from Factiva, LexisNexis and Thomson Compared in Current Issue of VIP

An independent comparative product review of Thomson NewsRoom, LexisNexis and Factiva (The Big Three) has just been published by VIP.

VIP conducts in-depth independent reviews of business information products. To help customers choose among the major vendors, November's issue takes on all of The Big Three and compares them side-by-side in a detailed review.

The issue is available to purchase online as a one-off copy priced GBP 54 or by annual subscription starting at GBP 280 for a single location at: http://web.vivavip.com/go/vip/48

New This Year

VIP conducted a similar comparative review in December 2006, mere weeks before Thomson announced that it was discontinuing its Thomson Business Intelligence service at the end of 2007. Among the challenges of this year's research was to determine which other product within Thomson companies would be best to compare to Factiva and LexisNexis in terms of news research capabilities.

Editor Pam Foster selected NewsRoom as the Thomson product, following extensive discussion with different divisions of Thomson.

The three major services are extensively and independently compared in terms of number of sources, analysis by subjects, type of publication, language, geography (including a table comparing numbers of sources for hard-to-find countries); length of archive, number of full-text items, number of abstracts, number of translated items; and timeliness (how long before an item becomes available online), among other factors.

The same searches are carried out on all three services, and the results are analysed in terms of overlap, type of publication and more.

Key Findings

Among the key findings of the research are the following:

• Language: Factiva is the most multi-lingual of all three services (offering 22 languages) against 16 for LexisNexis and 11 for NewsRoom.
  
  
• UK and US coverage: Coverage of UK newspapers is evenly spread across the three services.
  
  
• Asia Pacific coverage: Most of the major Asia Pacific newspapers are available across all three services. For some titles, LexisNexis offers a slightly older archive than Factiva.
  
  
• Latin American coverage: Factiva has a slight edge over the other two.
  
  
• Middle Eastern newspaper coverage: Three out of four sources are not available on NewsRoom. A deeper archive is available on LexisNexis than on Factiva.
  
  
• Web content: Web content is available on all three but it is not possible to distinguish web content from other published content on NewsRoom
  
  
• Multimedia content: Factiva is the only one of the three to offer multimedia content as part of its prime service.
  
  
• Company, industry and market data: Investext reports are no longer being updated on LexisNexis and NewsRoom.
  
  
• Indexing and updating: All three services provide detailed indexing but only Factiva and LexisNexis extend their updating to foreign- language documents.
  
  
• Language interfaces: Factiva.com offers the same nine language interfaces. NewsRoom offers a greater choice of interface languages than the old TBI service. LexisNexis has extended its number of interface language options and has new customised country interfaces for UK, US and Australia.
  
  
• Source lists: LexisNexis and Factiva both enable the user to create custom source lists.
  
  
• Search output: De-duplication when searching is a basic option on Factiva and NewsRoom but an irritating omission on Nexis. The ability to display all search results in KWIC format is a big plus for Nexis users, as is the automatic and useful sorting of results by format, subject, company, geography, language and people.
  
  

The full review runs 43 pages and includes screen shots, detailed search results and editorial commentary throughout.

Information for Editors

VIP is a monthly publication of in-depth product reviews and news analysis for the premium content industry. It is available by paid annual subscription and is delivered in digital (PDF) format by email. VIP is published by Free Pint Limited.

Pam Foster, editor of VIP, has been actively involved in the business information industry as a writer and reviewer for 20 years.

• Request a sample issue of VIP: http://www.vivavip.com/sample.html
  
  
• Subscriptions are available on the Order Page: http://www.vivavip.com/order/
  
  
• Individual back issues can be purchased through the online Archive: http://web.vivavip.com/go/vip/
  
  
• Members of AIIP, SLA and fResource receive discounts on some subscription levels: http://www.vivavip.com/order/partners.html
  
  

About Free Pint Limited

Free Pint Limited is a UK-based publisher of web sites and publications serving different niches within the global information industry. Its properties include FreePint http://www.freepint.com, a global community of over 79,000 information practitioners who find, use, manage and share business information; VIP http://www.vivaVIP.com, a paid-subscription publication for senior- level decision-makers with budgetary control for premium content products and services; Jinfo http://www.Jinfo.com, an online searchable database of information jobs in the UK, Australia and North America; and ResourceShelf and DocuTicker http://www.resourceshelf.com, http://www.docuticker.com, two websites updated daily with resources, full-text reports and other items of interest to researchers, journalists, librarians and other information professionals.

Learn more about FreePint at Onopoly, the one-stop site for contributors and advertisers within the network: http://www.Onopoly.com.

About VIP

VIP is a digital magazine published monthly and distributed to a paid- subscriber readership of senior-level decision-makers with budgetary control for premium content products and services. Each issue features in-depth, unbiased reviews of premium content products, along with analysis and commentary on news in the field. Subscriptions are available on a single-site and multi-site basis and provide invaluable insight for information professionals, analysts, publishers and other stakeholders in the business information and premium content arena.

Qualified members of the trade press may submit a request for a professional courtesy subscription to VIP. Requests will be considered on a case-by-case basis. For further information, please contact Robin Neidorf at robin.neidorf@freepint.com .

- Ends -

Read other FreePint Press Releases.