Thomson ISI ResearchSoft Ships New Data Analysis Tool RefViz for Mac OS X

World’s Most Popular Bibliography Maker Offers Visualization Software for Mining Reference Literature
 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Carlsbad, CA, USA - March 24, 2004—Thomson ISI ResearchSoft announced the immediate availability of RefViz™ for Mac® OS X. The first affordable visualization tool for the researcher’s desktop, RefViz was developed in collaboration with OmniViz, Inc. RefViz provides users with a powerful way to explore reference literature visually for major themes and topics. References can be moved easily between RefViz and EndNote®, the popular ISI ResearchSoft bibliographic software, enabling users to publish results faster.

“RefViz is a wonderful program that allows one to easily separate the ‘wheat’ from the ‘chaff.’”—David J. Smith, Ph.D.

“RefViz actually pointed out references I had missed despite extensive research.”—John Ward, student

“We are pleased to deliver the text analysis and visualization capabilities of RefViz to the Macintosh® platform,” said David Kochalko, president of Thomson ISI ResearchSoft. “Now, using RefViz in concert with bibliographic software, Macintosh users can quickly evaluate vast amounts of references, accelerating the research process. RefViz is an excellent example of the complementary tools we are developing and licensing to improve the research and publishing experience of our customers.”

“Mac OS X has rapidly become the platform of choice for research scientists because it runs both high end UNIX research algorithms as well as productivity and publication tools like the new RefViz," said Ron Okamoto, Apple's vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations. "With RefViz, scientists will be able to speed up their research through more comprehensive gathering and organizing of relevant publication data.”

Explore reference literature visually
Today’s academicians, students and researchers are faced with an overwhelming amount of information to organize, track and understand. RefViz, a text analysis and visualization software program, provides users with an interactive display to explore references easily. An at-a-glance overview reveals trends and associations, allowing researchers to quickly orient themselves with the literature. RefViz provides a suite of tools for detailed exploration of online search results and reference collections, helping users retain important information otherwise lost when narrowing a search or skimming a list.

View references in Galaxy and Matrix landscapes
The Galaxy view organizes references according to how they are related conceptually and provides an overview of how each reference is related to every other reference. This process is analogous to arranging stacks of papers according to themes, and then placing these stacks in proximity to each other based on their degree of commonality. The Matrix view lets users review subjects discussed together in the literature by highlighting the co-occurrence of key terms. This helps users understand the overlap and associations between concepts. With RefViz’s additional tools, users can apply their expertise to fine tune their analyses.

Publish results faster
Used with EndNote, RefViz provides an additional level of analysis to existing reference collections and lets users find the most relevant citations for their papers. Researchers, writers and students depend on EndNote to locate bibliographic data and create bibliographies for curricula vitae, manuscripts, grant proposals, term papers and other publications. Using ISI ResearchSoft products, writers save countless hours of typing and interpreting style requirements of scholarly publications by simply selecting the publication by name and generating a perfectly formatted document. The combination of text analysis and bibliographic management makes these products ideal for any discipline whether in the sciences or the arts and humanities.

Pricing and Availability
RefViz is designed for Mac OS X and Microsoft® Windows® NT/ME/2000/XP. The list price of RefViz is $299.95 USD. Special introductory prices are available from Thomson ISI ResearchSoft and authorized resellers worldwide. For more information on RefViz and a list of international distributors, visit www.refviz.com.

About OmniViz
OmniViz, Inc. (www.omniviz.com) provides information visualization and decision support software and components. OmniViz technologies quickly transform raw data into high-value knowledge. Their patented and proprietary methods uniquely can be applied to many types of data (text documents, numeric data, chemical structures, and more) in the same visual framework.

About the Thomson Corporation and Thomson Scientific
The Thomson Corporation (www.thomson.com), with 2003 revenues of $7.6 billion, is a global leader in providing integrated information solutions to business and professional customers. Thomson provides value-added information, software tools and applications to more than 20 million users in the fields of scientific research and healthcare, law, tax, accounting, financial services, higher education, reference information, and corporate training and assessment. With operational headquarters in Stamford, CT, Thomson has approximately 39,000 employees and provides services in approximately 130 countries. The Corporation's common shares are listed on the New York and Toronto exchanges (NYSE:TOC; TSX: TOC).

The Thomson scientific information solutions can be found at www.thomson.com/scientific. Thomson Scientific delivers essential patent, standards, scientific, and technical information enabling world-class research and business results. Its information solutions include, ISI Web of Knowledge^SM—facilitating discovery by offering seamless navigation to high-quality, multidisciplinary journal and Web content, evaluation tools; Delphion Research—providing access to full-text patent documents from the world’s leading patent authorities; Derwent World Patents Index®—the most comprehensive database of value-added patent documents; Techstreet—offering a wide variety of engineering codes and standards, plus information management resources; EndNote®, ProCite®, Reference Manager®, RefViz™ and WriteNote™—developing solutions to advance research, writing and publishing.