Review: Quosa’s sharing habit will be hard to resist

All the major players in the information sector are developing integrated workflow technology. In plain English, workflow tools let users take published content from a web-based information source and utilise it in a whole variety of ways. Elsevier, Factiva, Wiley and Thomson are just a few with such offerings available.

Quosa is an information management application that offers search, organising and sharing tools for the scientific, technical and medical (STM) online information sources Ovid, PubMed and Google Scholar.

At last year’s Online Information show, Quosa was one of the highlights of the Ovid stand, following a deal between the two companies in the autumn. Quosa is basically a desktop plug-in that wraps itself around your browser. It does not replace the search engine of the information source; Quosa’s search facilities are text mining tools that let you dig deeply into the content once it has been retrieved.

The main driver for adopting Quosa is its ability to create an information sharing environment. It lets users create virtual libraries of information that other members of a team or organisation can access and share. Quosa has also been developed to integrate with citation management applications such as EndNote.

As a plug-in, Quosa (an acronym standing for query, organise, share and analyse) is obtained by download from the website. Once installed, the system is up and running within minutes. The Oxford Quosa office is currently developing Athens authentication, which will enable users in academia and the NHS to add it to their toolkit.

Once Quosa is installed, you access it by clicking on the application logo on your desktop. The resulting window will contain an internet browser, which will default to the last information source used.

Using the search engine within Ovid, for example, you can retrieve a set of articles by ticking the check boxes and then clicking on the Retrieve button on the right-hand side of the lowest toolbar within Quosa. Next to the Retrieve button is a text box where you can enter a number, say 10; Quosa will then retrieve only the 10 most recent articles from the information source you entered in your search criteria.

The beauty of the system is that it loses none of the functionality of the information source. You can still grab the PDF or use any of the functions present, but the user’s experience and ability to do more for their organisation or team is enhanced by Quosa.

Once you have selected and retrieved articles, Quosa splits into two panels – the lower one continues to display Ovid’s browser window, while the top panel contains your retrieved content library, with all articles listed by type, author, title and source.

A left-hand panel holds the My Article Organizer and Document Summary tools. My Article Organizer is a personal navigation tool and includes files for saved searches, alerts and personal folders as well as a set of libraries that each user within a team can set up and share with other members of the team.

Document Summary is one of the simplest ideas IWR has yet seen for article selection and decision-making. You click on an article in the top panel of your retrieved information and then enter Document Summary, which displays a miniature presentation of the entire article, colour-coded in yellow and blue. Yellow highlights indicate that a section of the article features two examples of your search term; a blue highlight indicates just one term. You can quickly scroll through the Document Summary window, scan-reading the highlights, and make an instant decision on whether an article is of use to you or your team.

You can share the results of your research with your peers by setting up virtual libraries in the My Article Organizer panel. Once you have selected the information you want to save and share, you click on the Save button and set up a folder in your folders list using the same Windows Explorer navigation tools most people are familiar with.

To add the content to the library and share it, move it into a folder you have created, and all the content will appear in the top panel. A Publish button displaying a set of books will appear. Select the articles you want to make available in the library, click on the Publish button, choose which library you want to publish to, and it’s all done. Everyone in your team who is a member of that library will now have access to your research.

Quosa is an advanced way to create and share resources among team members. Don’t confuse this tool with social computing applications as it is tethered to the PCs of users, but for resource sharing in a major global corporation it is a simple and easy-to-use way of ensuring that everyone gets access to the same research papers.

In brief

Quosa
www.quosa.com
STM document sharing and text mining tool that enhances services such as Ovid, PubMed, and Google Scholar

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