Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

98 Chapter 4
databases that even your college or university doesn’t have. Whether or not
you use an online service, be sure to use the documentation tools described
here when you are starting out on a research project. If online versions are not
available, use the paper versions.
A word of caution to new scholars who are writing for publication: Online
literature searches make it easy for people to find articles only if the articles
(or their abstracts) contain descriptive words. Cute titles on scientific articles
hide them from people who want to find them in the indexing tools. If you
write an article about illegal Mexican labor migration to the United States and
call it something like ‘‘Whither Juan? Mexicans on the Road,’’ it’s a sure bet
to get lost immediately, unless (1) you happen to publish it in one of the most
widely read journals and (2) it happens to be a blockbuster piece of work that
everyone talks about and is cited in articles that do have descriptive titles.
Since most scientific writing is not of the blockbuster variety, you’re better
off putting words into the titles of your articles that describe what the articles
are about. It may seem awfully dull, but descriptive, unimaginative titles are
terrific for helping your colleagues find and cite your work.
As formidable as the amount of information being produced in the world is,
there is an equally formidable set of documentation resources for accessing
information. If you have to use just one of these, then my choice is the Web
of Science.
Web of Science
The Thompson Institute for Scientific Information, or ISI (http://www
.isinet.com) produces the Science Citation Index Expanded (the SCI), the
Social Sciences Citation Index (the SSCI), and the Arts and Humanities Citation
Index (the A&HCI). Together, these three indexes comprise the Web of
Science, the indispensable resource for doing a literature search. These
indexes are available online at most university libraries, and in many small
college libraries. I used the paper versions of the SSCI, the SCI, and the A&
HCI for 30 years, and if the online versions vanished, I’d go back to the paper
ones in a minute. They’re that good.
At the ISI, hundreds of people pore over 8,600 journals each year. They
examine each article in each journal and enter the title, author, journal, year,
and page numbers. In addition, the staff enters all the references cited by each
author of each article in each journal surveyed. Some articles have a handful
of references, but review articles, like the ones in the Annual Review series,
can have hundreds of citations. All those citations go into the Web of Science
databases. So, if you know the name of just one author whose work should be
cited by anyone working in a particular field, you can find out, for any given