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of knowledge and the sociology of science, as well as the sociology of the
arts, religion, and education.
Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts
LLBA, published by Sociological Abstracts, Inc., indexes and abstracts
journals in descriptive linguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics,
psycholinguistics, and so on. It is an excellent resource for work on discourse
analysis and all forms of text analysis. The database contained about 360,000
entries in 2005 and is growing at about 18,000 entries a year.
LEXIS/NEXIS
LEXIS/NEXIS (http://www.lexis.com/) began in 1973 as a way to help lawyers
find information on cases. Today, the Lexis-Nexis Universe database contains
the actual text of about ten million articles from over 18,000 sources,
including more than 5,600 news, business, legal, and medical sources. This
source includes 55 of the world’s major newspapers and 65 newspapers and
magazines that target specific ethnic groups in the United States. If your
library gives you access to LEXIS-NEXIS, then no literature search is complete
until you’ve used it. LN has the complete New York Times from June 1,
1980, to the present. For more historical documents (especially for historical
data on ethnic groups in the United States), use the New York Times full-text
database, if your library has it. That index goes back to the first issue on Sept.
18, 1851.
The CIS
Lexis-Nexis has grown by acquiring several other major databases. One is
the CIS, or Congressional Information Service. This service indexes U.S.
House and Senate hearings, reports entered into public access by submission
to Congress, and testimony before congressional committees. All of these, are
in print and available to the public, free, either through libraries (at least one
library in every state in the United States is designated a Federal Depository
Library and has every document printed by the U.S. government) or through
the U.S. Government Printing Office.
You can get access to any public documents published by the U.S. Congress
at http://thomas.loc.gov/ (the ‘‘thomas’’ refers to Thomas Jefferson), but if you
have access to Lexis-Nexis, it’s easier to use that service to find things in the
CIS. There are congressional reports on many topics of interest to anthropolo-