Reference at Newman Library

Tag: Factiva

Browsing Headlines in Factiva

Last year, Factiva moved the feature that let you browse the daily headlines for major publications from its own standalone page (“News Pages”) to a box on the “Home” page. When you first click into Factiva, you land in the “Search” page. To view the “Newsstand,” click the “Home” navigation option at the top and then scroll down the page.

Instructions for how to get to this handy display has been updated on the following research guides:

Factiva Is Down (see update)

UPDATE: As of 1:30 PM, access has been restored. Details on this new blog post.

Thanks to alerts on the EZproxy mailing list this morning, I learned that Factiva access is down. I’m not sure that the problem is but once you log in, you get this error message on a Factiva page:

We are unable to process your request at this time. Please try again in a few minutes.

Error: 210905
Server: AWSPFWAPPS07

I’ve added a “temporarily unavailable” note to the database link in LibGuides. As soon as access is restored, I’ll post an update on the blog.

 

Searching for Negative Business News

Both Factiva and NexisUni offer searchers easy access to negative news stories. In NexisUni you can narrow your search results to Negative News using the filters on the left of the results page. Run your news search, then select the Negative News filter. It will narrow your results to articles that contain negative or critical information about a person or a company. The results can be overwhelming so you might want to search within the results or limit by publication.

Factiva has pre-built searches for narrowing a search for news sentiment, either positive or negative. Set up your search on a person or company or industry and then click on Factiva Expert Search in the search options to choose “News Sentiment”.  The News Sentiment category is further subdivided by Negative News- Corporate, Negative News – People, Negative News – Political, and Negative News for various industry sectors. Make your choice by opening the plus sign to select English language. (You must select a language to add the category to your search).

Factiva Expert Searches are pre-defined search strings created by Factiva search experts to find not only News Sentiment but news on topics and subjects that are often difficult for searchers to compose on their own. Thought leadership, customer service, digital analytics, investor sentiment, and institutional investor risk are some of the topics in Expert Search. There are also a limited number of “Trending Topics” like Brexit.

Factiva Is Not Accessible [UPDATED]

UPDATED 25 Oct. 2016, 9:48 am (see below)

I got off the phone with ProQuest tech support, who is looking into why we’re unable to get into Factiva (when you try, you get a login page from Factiva). ProQuest says they got a message from last night from Dow Jones indicating that there were Factiva problems, but it isn’t clear if those problems are causing our access issue.

I’ve added a note to the listing for Factiva in LibGuides system that indicates the database is temporarily inaccessible.

UPDATE: Factiva access is working again.

The Trick to Opening Emailed Articles from Factiva

Thanks to Harry for alerting me to this issue. If you have emailed yourself an article from Factiva, you’ll see that the article itself is not attached in the email, nor is the full text embedded in the body of the email. Instead, you get an email with a HTML attachment that you need to open. If you try to open that file attachment, it will open in your default browser and present you a page that looks like this:

Factiva--emailed article page

If you click on the article title, you get taken to a Factiva page that asks for a login and that is essentially a dead end for us:

Factiva--login page

Here’s the solution to this problem:

  1. Before you try to open the article from the email you’ve got, go to your browser and launch Factiva (from our databases page)
  2. Now that Factiva is loaded in your browser, go back to the email and click the file attachment to open it.
  3. You’ll still get that page with the article title on it and will still need to click the article title.
  4. Once you click the article title, the page should load the Factiva database and show you the full text of the article.

Remote Access Anomaly with Factiva (update: fixed on 9 May 2014)

Update: 9 May 2014 This problem is now fixed.

A number of libraries that use EZproxy (like us) for remote login authentication are finding that when you go to Factiva, you get a somewhat scary looking warning message from your browser. Here’s the exact behavior:

  1. User who is off campus clicks on link on library website for Factiva
  2. User gets the usual remote authentication page that asks for Baruch username and password
  3. After successfully entering login info, the browser starts to go to Factiva but then shows a page with a scary looking warning. Depending on your browser, the warning message will look like this:

Chrome

Factiva--browser warning message in Chrome

Firefox

Factiva--browser warning message in Firefox

It is perfectly OK for users to ignore this warning and click the relevant button(s) that let them move on. In Chrome, you click “Proceed Anyway.” In Firefox, you click “I Understand the Risks.” I have contacted tech support at ProQuest (which provides us access to Factiva) for assistance with this and am also looking into possible solutions on the EZproxy mailing list, where this problem has in the last week been raised by a number of other libraries.