STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands, has announced the launch of a structured Product Literature Database (PLD) solution for professionals in the life sciences. The PLD solution is a further development of the QUOSA literature management solution and enables a higher level of scalability, automation and usability. QUOSA, a content management and workflow productivity solutions provider, was acquired by Elsevier in January 2012.
PLDs are centralised repositories of product-related scientific literature maintained by life sciences institutions to meet regulatory reporting requirements, address medical inquiries and inform progress in product development. These are used by a broad array of groups within life science institutions who need to access public information related to their company’s and competitor’s products. PLDs primarily contain information from journal and conference abstracts as well as some other public sources, for instance media articles.
Elsevier has tailored and upgraded QUOSA’s solution to serve the specific needs of life sciences professionals such as pharmacovigilance and medical affairs personnel in pharma, biotech and medical device companies. New functionalities include outbound email alert setting by end users. Users can set their own alerts on any search or topic area in the PLD, including alert topics created by expert information professionals. Enhanced scalability supports the import of hundreds or thousands of alerts from a range of external sources. Automated tagging of search results helps in efficient management of large sets of results. Enhanced search interface includes configurable faceted browsing of search results.
