Business & News

Westlaw now offers financial news coverage from MarketWatch and Thomson Financial proprietary content through its Thomson Financial News (THOMSONFIN) database. Included are full-text documents from the newswire Thomson Financial News that focus on real-time industry and company news for the North American equities market.

Features and options

Search: Search using terms and connectors or natural language. It is possible to eliminate duplicate documents by clicking on the radio button next to that option (under the standard search box).

SmartTerms can be used in conjunction with a Terms and Connectors Search or on their own (without entering other search terms). According to West, “Industry, Subject, and Location SmartTerms are assigned to a document based on the subject represented, so they do not need to appear in a document to retrieve the document. For example, a news article in Fortune magazine that discusses the commercial release of a newly developed medical device is assigned the SmartTerm Medical Devices even though it doesn't mention the terms medical or device. Company SmartTerms, on the other hand, are assigned only when a company is mentioned in a document. To search for company-specific NewsRoom documents, use the common name of the company, its ticker symbol, or SIC code.”

For more information on searching with SmartTerms, click on the yellow button with a question mark inside, which can be found on the THOMSONFIN standard search page next to the phrase “Limit Your Search using SmartTerms.”