How to Search Factiva

Factiva is a business information and research tool that collects information from thousands of non-scholarly sources, such as newspapers, magazines, websites, radio and television transcripts, and more. You can use Factiva to look up information and news media from around the world, going back to 1951. You can access Factiva by going to the library’s list of research databases.  

When you first access Factiva you’ll land on the home page, which lists trending news articles and regional headlines. At the top middle of the page is a basic search bar where you can type in your search terms. Your search terms could be the name of a company, a specific industry or geographic region, or a concept you’re interested in. Factiva uses natural search language, so you can type a question or phrase into the search bar, or if you prefer to use a structured search query that incorporates search operators and modifiers, you can do that too.   

Once you’ve run your search, you’ll see a list of results sorted in order of relevance. You may also see an AI-generated summary of your results at the top of the page. At the top right of your search results are three dropdown menus and 1 button. These menus change the search view, change the sorting method of results being shown, and change the publication date range being searched. The small button to the right of these dropdown menus allows for search filters to be implemented.  

 By default, Factiva searches the last three months of content. You can click on the publication date drop-down menu to select a different publication date range or select Custom Date to specify any date range you like.  

 To the right of the publication date dropdown, just above your search results, you will see an icon that looks like three lines forming an upside-down triangle – click this icon to view your filtering options. The filters are broken into categories and give you some options for focusing your results to those that are likely to be more relevant to your work. You can reduce your search results to just those from a specific newspaper or publication source, a specific company, industry, geographic region, topic subject, language, and more. Click on the items you want to focus on - or click the No icon to the right of an item to exclude related results from your search.   

For example, let’s say I wanted to find information on how organizations are incorporating social capitalism into measures of success. I will start by typing ‘how does social capitalism redefine success’ into the Factiva search bar and press enter on my keyboard. The GenAI summary shows an overview response based on information from a number of outlets. I’m interested in seeing how this conversation has evolved over the last five years, so I’m going to select the publication date range drop-down menu and select Last Five Years. I’m also interested in knowing if students are learning about this topic, so I’m going to click on the filters icon, select Business Schools from the Industry category, and Education from the Subject category. Every time you apply a filter, your search results change to refocus on the options you’ve chosen. You will see the filters you have applied at the top of your search results, and you can remove them at any point.  

Once you’ve run your search and applied any relevant filters, you can access individual items by clicking on the title. The full text of the article should be visible on the page, and you can also click the download icon, shown just above and to the left of the article text, to download or print a copy of the article.   

When you’re done using Factiva, please remember to log out by clicking on the Logout link on the bottom left side of the page. Our licence only allows for six people at the University to use Factiva at a time, and if you forget to logout it could block someone else from getting timely access.