Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

The Literature Search 101
like demography, economics, and psychology. The database for AL grows by
about 10,000 citations every year. AL is particularly good for finding older
materials on North American, Middle American, and South American archeology
and ethnology. The Tozzer Library was founded in 1866, and many of
the periodicals received by the library have been indexed since before World
War I. You can use AL, then, as a complete index to major journals, such as
the American Anthropologist, American Antiquity, and the like.
AL and AIO are available in one combined database, called Anthropology
Plus, through the RLG (Research Libraries Group) Eureka database. If your
library doesn’t subscribe to this database, you can use AIO at no cost.
Abstracts in Anthropology
AIA is a quarterly journal, published since 1970 (in print form only, not
online), that selectively covers current literature on archeology, cultural
anthropology, physical anthropology, and linguistics. Indexing journals, like
AIO and AL, simply list all the items and cross-index them by author, title,
and subject heading. An abstracting journal summarizes the articles it covers
by publishing abstracts of from 50 to 200 words.
Indexing services cover more ground; abstracting services provide more
depth. AIA publishes 150-word abstracts of the research articles in each of
about 130 journals in each issue. AIA publishes the abstracts to all the
research articles in the seven most important journals for cultural anthropologists,
so browsing through AIA from time to time is a great way to keep up
with what’s going on in anthropology. The seven top journals are, in alphabetical
order: American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Current Anthropology,
Ethnology, Human Organization, Journal of Anthropological
Research, and the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
AIA covers some journals not covered by other publications—journals like
Oral History (published by the Institute of Papua New Guinea) and Caribbean
Studies (published by the Institute of Caribbean Studies at the University of
Puerto Rico). The SSCI didn’t cover the Papers in Anthropology series of the
University of Oklahoma, but AIA used to cover it, and one of the papers
abstracted by AIA in 1983 was by G. Agogino and B. Ferguson on an Indian-
Jewish community in the state of Hidalgo, Mexico, very close to the Ñähñu
Indian communities I’ve studied.
Of course, I would have located the paper through the SSCI had anyone
cited it in one of the three million articles that the SSCI has indexed just since
1984 (the first year the article could have been cited), but a check revealed
that no one did cite it, so looking through AIA was probably the only way I
could have run into that particular piece of work.