Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

102 Chapter 4
International Bibliography of Anthropology
This source is part of the International Bibliography of the Social Sciences
(IBSS) series that began in 1952 as a product of the International Committee
on Social Science Information and Documentation (ICSSID), a UNESCOfunded
body. There were four volumes in the set each year, one each on sociology,
political science, economics, and cultural anthropology. In recent
years, the IBSS has been published commercially and is now both a paper and
an online product. The unique thing about the IBSS is that the volumes are
based on data submitted by librarians around the world (from Thailand, Haiti,
Zambia, Hungary, Argentina, etc.) who document the social science information
being produced in their countries.
This information is entered into a computer and is sorted and selected for
inclusion in each year’s volumes. The procedure takes a long time, so the
paper bibliographies are not all that current, but they are a very good source
for locating materials published by national and regional journals in the developing
world and in eastern European countries. The online version of the
IBSS, however, is updated weekly, and it contains all the information from
over 50 years of documentation effort.
ERIC
The Educational Resources Information Center, or ERIC, began in 1966 as
a microfiche archive to index literature of interest to researchers in education.
ERIC is free and online at http://www.eric.ed.gov. Many of the journals that
ERIC indexes are of direct relevance to work in anthropology, and with over
a million citations, it’s a treasure. But the unique advantage of ERIC is the
access it gives you to the gray literature—over 100,000, full-text research
reports on studies funded by government agencies and by private foundations.
(The database is updated weekly and grows by about 34,000 documents every
year.)
For example, I follow the efforts of indigenous peoples around the world to
keep their languages alive. I found a report in ERIC by Marion Blue Arm,
published in a conference proceeding, on attitudes by Indians, Whites, and
mixed families toward the teaching of Lakota in the schools on the Cheyenne
River Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. ERIC is filled with useful material
like that.
NTIS
NTIS, the National Technical Information Service, indexes and abstracts
federally funded research reports in all areas of science. Many technical