The ideal command language: a comparison of the command languages of Dialóg, Data-Star, Orbit, Pergamon InfoLine and STN online services

Abstract

The most important criteria of the effectiveness of online searching are associated with the search possibilities offered by the command language of the service. A comparison of the main features of the command languages of Dialog, Data-Star, Orbit, Pergamon InfoLine and STN systems is presented, their advantages and drawbacks are analyzed, with special attention to subject searches in chemistry. The aspects of the comparison are proximity searching, truncation, postqualification of set numbers, inverted file structure, save commands, automatic extraction of data elements of retrieved records for subsequent use, searching the direct file, limiting possibilities, print formats, graphic search, database availability, time and cost factors, user services. Since the introduction of the DIALOG 2 command language, the new version of Dialog service, it can be regarded as the most advanced one of the five compared.