Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

106 Chapter 4
provides an expanding list of reviews of books, articles, and software of interest
to anthropologists. The Scout Report for Social Sciences, at http://scout.cs
.wisc.edu/, is an expanding database of Internet sites. It’s published weekly.
Search the site for ‘‘anthropology’’ and you’ll find lots of useful, full-text
resources, like the one at http://www.nativetech.org/, devoted to Native American
technology and art.
To find general information about particular countries of the world, start
with the Yahoo server http://dir.yahoo.com/Regional/Countries/ and also consult
the CIA Factbook at http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/
index.html. Going to the Manu’a Islands to do fieldwork? Detailed maps for
just about every country and region of the world (including the Manu’a
Islands) are available online at http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/index.html at
the University of Texas. For websites developed and maintained by particular
countries, start with http://www.library.nwu.edu/govpub/resource/internat/
foreign.html at Northwestern University. All government statistical reports are
subject to error. Use with caution.
Tips for Searching Online Databases
1. Make sure you get the spelling right. It’s not as easy as it sounds. If you ask the
search engine at Yahoo.com or MSN.com for information on ‘‘New Guinae,’’ it’ll
ask if you really meant ‘‘New Guinea.’’ Unfortunately, as of 2005, many of the
databases I’ve told you about lack such intelligent spell-checkers, so if you make
a mistake, you’re on your own. Keep a list of commonly misspelled words handy
on your computer (misspelled is commonly misspelled, of course) so if you ask
for references on ‘‘apropriate technology’’ and it comes back, incongruously,
with ‘‘nothing found,’’ you can figure out what’s wrong. Or type any word you’re
not sure about into http://dictionary.reference.com/. If you’ve got the wrong
spelling, that site’s intelligent spell-checker will try to figure out what you meant
to say.
2. If there are two ways to spell a word, be sure to search with both spellings. Use
both Koran and Qur’an (and several other spelling variants) in your searches;
Chanukah and Hanukah (and several other spelling variants); Rom and Roma
(both are used to refer to Gypsies); Thessaloniki and Salonika; Madras and Chennai;
Beijing and Peking; and so on.
I asked MEDLINE for articles from 1990 until January 2005 on (childhood
diarrhea) OR (infantile diarrhea) and got 2,730. Then I changed the spelling
to (childhood diarrhoea) OR (infantile diarrhoea)—the spelling more commonly
used in Britain—and got another 1,056 hits.
I searched Sociological Abstracts for references to the Attitudes Toward