Thomson Reuters Sells Dialog to ProQuest

Business Publisher, June 17, 2008

ProQuest (Ann Arbor, MI), a unit of Cambridge Information Group (Bethesda, MD) and a provider of online information and scholarship across a range of fields, has signed an agreement to acquire Thomson Reuters Dialog (Cary, NC) from Thomson Reuters (New York). No terms of the deal were given. ProQuest said the purchase will "deepen its penetration in the corporate library and professional research markets."

Established in 1966, Dialog was the world's first online information retrieval system. Currently, the company's online-based information services are designed to help organizations seek competitive advantage in such fields as business, science, engineering, finance and the law. Its portfolio of products, including Dialog and DataStar, allow users to retrieve data from more than 1.4 billion unique records of information.

The company operates in 27 countries and offers online research tools for access to relevant databases designed to meet the specific needs of its wide range of users, including information professionals and end-users within business, professional and government organizations in more than 100 countries. Its collection of over 900 databases handles more than 700,000 searches and over 17 million page views per month.

Searchable content includes articles and reports from thousands of real-time news feeds, newspapers, broadcast transcripts and trade publications, plus market research reports, analyst notes, scientific and technical data, patents, trademarks and other intellectual property data. Other content areas include government regulations, social sciences, food and agriculture, reference, energy and environment, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and medicine.

ProQuest CEO Marty Kahn said that Dialog "is an exceptionally good fit in the ProQuest family ... (the two companies) share a deep understanding of the library community and commitment to serving it with high-quality information tools."

ProQuest said that Dialog will continue to be a distribution channel for Thomson Reuters content, including for Derwent World Patents Index, Investext, TrademarkScan, SciSearch, and BIOSIS, among other databases. ProQuest offers access to more than 125 billion digital pages of information and scholarship for researchers in a variety of fields, from arts, literature and social science to science, technology and medicine.