Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

The Literature Search 97
too busy to respond to requests for lists of articles and books. On the other
hand, most people will talk to you on the phone. A knowledgeable person in
the field can give you three or four key citations over the phone right on the
spot, and, with the online resources I’m going to tell you about here, that’s all
you need to get you straight into the literature.
Review Articles
The Annual Review series is a good place to start reading. There are Annual
Review volumes for many disciplines, including psychology (every year since
1950), anthropology (every year since 1972), sociology (since 1975), public
health (since 1997), and political science (since 1998). Authors who are
invited to publish in these volumes are experts in their fields; they have
digested a lot of information and have packaged it in a way that gets you right
into the middle of a topic in a hurry. Review articles in journals and bibliographies
published as books are two other excellent sources.
Every article in the Annual Review series is available online, providing your
library subscribes to this service. If it doesn’t, then use the printed volumes.
Don’t worry about printed review articles being out of date. The Web of Science
and other documentation resources have eliminated the problem of obsolescence
in bibliographies and review articles. This will be clear when you
read about the Web of Science below.
Bibliographic Search Tools: The Online Databases
The overwhelming majority of the research in any discipline is published
in thousands of journals (no, I’m not exaggerating), some of which are short
lived. A lot of descriptive data on social issues (crime, health care delivery,
welfare) is published in reports from governments, industry, and private
research foundations. No research project should be launched (and certainly
no request for funding of a research project should be submitted) until you
have thoroughly searched these potential sources for published research on the
topic you are interested in.
Many—but not all—of the bibliographic tools that I describe here are available
both online and as paper products. Some of the largest online databases
are free, and when that’s the case, I provide the Internet address. Many databases
are commercial products that are available only by subscription. Check
with your school library to see which of these commercial databases they subscribe
to. And check with your local city library, also. They may subscribe to