News

story research guide: Duke Library resources for news archives

First steps
Be sure to review three excellent library resources prepared by the subject librarian, Catherine Shreve: 1. Public policy guide: http://guides.library.duke.edu/public-policy 2. Library orientation for grad students: http://guides.library.duke.edu/grad- orientation 3. Guide for Public Policy 114: http://guides.library.duke.edu/PUBPOL114 (the News/Media section gives you a preview of what will be covered here.) The services are best for established news organizations. Whats missing Stories written by freelancers (often opinions and columns) may not be included in a given news source. Thats the common reason youd find something on a Google search that you cant find in the databases. Our versions of Nexis and Factiva are less complete than their commercial cousins. In fact, some of them are a bit misleading for us regarding what might be missing from our version. Newspaper companies New York Times, Washington Post, USAToday Nexis and Factiva Wall Street Journal and other Dow Jones news sources Factiva only Regional newspapers Both, but Nexis has better coverage of McClatchy newspapers, which include many major metro dailies including the Raleigh News & Observer and the Charlotte Observer. The Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times1 and other newspapers owned by the Tribune Co. are effectively missing in both of these sources. You have to search them elsewhere. Look in the e-journal section of the Duke Library to find them.

Whats wrong with Google?

Google is great for finding tidbits and looking at hobbyist or special interest websites. Its not great as a way to efficiently search established sources archives. When you use the news databases available through the library you dont have to worry about the pedigree of the material you find it actually appeared in the source listed. You can choose your sources or types of sources and conduct a targeted search across all of them at once. And you dont have to sign up or pay at each news site for the full story. You are encouraged (sometimes required) to use them and can quote the original source without fear. (Professors differ on whether they want you to say how you found the source.)

Other types of news sources Web-based publications Nexis Established news sites with original content such as Politico and Slate; online editions of many major news
The Los Angeles Times is crucial for news about the media or entertainment; national investigative stories and West Coast . The Chicago Tribune is important for stories about the Obamas or Midwestern news. It also has traditionally had good international investigations. To get to those sources, you can search their own sites, then find
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Choose your sources

Google gives you lots of results, but it doesnt tell you what it hasnt searched. It also includes a lot of sources that require vetting and circling back to the original. The news databases LexisNexis, Factiva, Americas Newsbank and Proquest tell you what you are searching and assure you youre getting the correct version.

Public Policy 125 research guide Sarah Cohen

Duke Library resources organizations such as CNN.com and NPR.org. None have Huffington Post or the Drudge Report. 2 Blogs Nexis A large collection of special interest blogs. Look for Newstex Media blogs for a collection of media critics. Broadcast transcripts Nexis Business publications and Reuters - Factiva General interest and trade magazines Nexis

NOTES

This list suggest that you will often start with LexisNexis, then move to Factiva to fill in the gaps once you know what you are looking for. The search concepts are the same in both places.

Fill in the gaps

One way to overcome some of the shortcomings of the resources we have is to create your own Google Custom search. This lets you search your own collection of sites but is unrelated to Google News. For example, Ive created a search that combines most of the specialized sites for investigative news stories it doesnt replace Nexis, but it helps overcome its shortcomings: http://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=01835 0939584033857265:71-nhhxlqxm Its easy to create one: just go to Google Custom Search at http://www.google.com/cse/ and get started.

I cant find any stated reason for this but can make an educated guess: these sources originate very little reporting on their own most is compilations of other sources or independent unpaid bloggers. I would guess but dont know that they resist distinguishing the material they own (and can get paid for) from material that someone else owns.
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Public Policy 125 research guide Sarah Cohen

Search strategies
A common strategy in any search, whether on the Internet or in library databases, is to find one or two useful examples, then examine those for markers that might help you either narrow or widen to find more. These traits dont have to be words or phrases they might be the kind of source, the author, people quoted, common industry terminology, style conventions and shorthand descriptions Washington Post, Wall Street Journal (Factiva only), Fox News, MSNBC. In Lexis Congressional, look for congressional hearings on the topic. Use the librarys think tank Google custom search, linked off of the public policy guide to find organizations with particular interest, then look at profiles by subject area. Once youve found a few specialists, return to your sources to find people who appear with them at conferences, hearings or in articles. Be careful of local news organizations use of experts. They are often under pressure to find someone local, regardless of their qualifications.

No more than you need

Set out a research plan for yourself and decide how much you need to know. Then stop when you find it. There are three common levels of research: A few articles or a few names of people to give you just enough information to get started on your work. This might be a basic chronology of events from a trusted source; a few of names of people to research or call; or a general sense of the controversies within a policy or topic. Editorials, op-eds and other opinion pieces are sometimes more efficient (and shorter) than news stories for this level. A reasonable understanding of the topic, person or organization. You will probably have to read 6-12 pieces before you feel informed, but you dont have to go very deep so long as you stick with news, not opinion. Deep research to determine all significant works on the person or topic. This is reserved for when you want to make sure you will not be repeating someone elses work especially important in original research and investigative journalism.

Backgrounding a person
Getting background on a person can be as simple as finding contact information and as extensive as getting information in advance of an interview or before using a person as a source. Make sure to confirm that the information you find is really about the right person. Examine anything that would give you a middle or maiden name, an approximate date of birth (age), hometown, family member or employer. Youd be surprised how many people have same name, even when its not common. Search news sources, including trade publications. If you need to narrow to a few news organizations or papers, find their hometown media or an industry newsletter. Use variations of the name and common misspellings. In Nexis, for example: ((james or jim!) pre/4 (stuart or stewart))

Finding policy experts

Your usual academic research skills will help you find many policy experts. Consider adding these sources to Google Scholar an other key sources: In Nexis and Factiva, try a range of national publications: New York Times,

Public Policy 125 research guide Sarah Cohen

Search strategies Elected and other high-level government officials have additional sources, notably financial disclosure and confirmation documents.

University alumni news and yearbooks Social media, especially LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Icerocket.com will search blogs and some social media for you. Employer websites, especially law firms, consultancies or colleges. Dont forget to look for non-profit and public company board memberships, which may have more detailed bios than the primary or current employer. Appointed government officials usually retain their status at law firms and universities their profiles are still there. Search public records in their hometown and their recent residences (which could be several states). The most common ones are: State and federal civil and criminal court indexes; real estate transactions; federal, state and local campaign finance reports; Securities and Exchange and non-profit tax documents; licensing records (gun, pet, business, medical, etc.); state corporate records, liens and UCC reports; voting records where public. There is no national or comprehensive free source for these records, but BRB Publications Inc. has a list of common public records and will connect you to vendors who want to sell you the information for about $40:

Background on a policy
Look for long stories on your topic in Nexis using a broad set of terms you know will appear in anything on it. length(>2000) If the term is common, look for stories that mention a key word or phrase many times: atleast10(allcaps(aids)) and atleast5(africa) Once you find a few stories, look for commonly quoted people (especially government officials or sponsoring legislators) or other terms that are likely to appear in others. Then use a less restrictive query that includes those terms or people. Search for other stories by the same reporters. They may have beat or follow- up coverage. Look for one policy or academic journal that has included an article about the policy and examine its table of contents for the past several years. Beware of searching for acronyms many news organizations have style rules that discourage their use.

Before publishing anything based on these records, confirm them with the person. You are responsible for what you publish -- besides the embarrassment, mistakenly saying someone is a criminal, for example, is libelous if youre not careful.

Look for oddities that might make you miss stories in particular news outlets. For example, some news organizations might only use the term HIV/AIDS, so a search for AIDS wouldnt catch anything. Others use middle names, initials, nicknames or alternative spellings. If you think a news source should have stories you are looking for, keep trying until you find some, then figure out where your query failed it might be failing elsewhere.

Public Policy 125 research guide Sarah Cohen

Search strategies

In-depth background of a topic or policy

Look for spikes in coverage or announced reforms that might have been prompted by an investigation by a government body, an NGO or a news outlet. Use the same techniques you would if you were just looking for basic background, but expand the source list and keep looking. Include: Investigative reporting prize sites, especially the resource center at ire.org Broadcast transcripts Industry trade publications Scholarly journals Government agency sites Specialized centers that cover the topic at universities and in quasi-government agencies GAO and Inspector General reports OpenCRS for Congressional Research Service reports Usaspending.gov for federal contract and grant information. Lobbying reports . And anything else you run across in those sources. The key is to find the terms that you need to use and the people youll likely find and keep searching for them in a wide range of sources.

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Public Policy 125 research guide Sarah Cohen

Using LexisNexis Academic news sources

Getting started with LexisNexis Academic
Use Firefox or Internet Explorer to use LexisNexis. The results are un-readable in Chrome and Safari. You will eventually have to sign into the Duke Library when you want to use any of the pay services. Get to LexisNexis through the Databases tab at the top of the library home page:

More precise searching techniques

You can use many of the advanced LexisNexis search features within the News form. Here are a couple of examples using a search for stories about Apple CEO Steven Jobs and the iPad. (Its probably overkill, but) This section says that a word starting with Steve (including Steven) must appear no more than two words before the word Jobs in the headline or lead paragraph (about 100 words).

This one is more complex. It says that the words jobs and apple have to have at least one capital (caps) letter each (to distinguish them from the common nouns) and they must show up in the same paragraph (w/p) at least once in the story.

When you start up LexisNexis, go directly to the News section: Then pick your sources (in this case, under newspapers and wires, US Newspapers and Wires).

And this one makes sure its about iPads, because the term has to show up at least five times in the story.

The program defaults to all available dates, which differ by specific publication. You might change it to something recent if youre just testing out a query:

Using Power Search

To use different sources or timing, you may have to and start over again. Thats when Power search comes in, which you can get to by clicking on the link at the bottom of the form. This turns your selections into the commands needed by LexisNexis for a search. You can

Then fill in the boxes with your terms.

Public Policy 125 research guide Sarah Cohen

Power searching on LexisNexis Academic then edit it for even more control. In this case, the only change I made in the search is that Ive added the condition that the story be at least 1,000 words long to distinguish significant stories from more routine ones.

Be careful about using the company, people and other index terms these are created by computers and are often wrong. For example, three of the 11 stories that met the criteria of this search didnt recognize Steven Jobs as the person in the story.

Use the Edit Search link at the top of the page to change your search. Using the Back button doesnt always work.

Reviewing your results

The search above only picked up 11 stories, three of them duplicates from the Associated Press. Expanding it to the latest year, before the iPad was released, gave a better set of stories: 38. Browse the list you get back by the type of publication and the publication name. You dont have to read any stories to see whether your search picked up expected publications or if you got way too much to even begin to evaluate. Reviewing your list is much easier if you know of one good example story.(say, something you found on Google). Then you can adjust the query several times to catch it and others like it. You may have to use alternative name spellings sometimes to catch everything you want. Even if you have to start from scratch, reviewing the headlines, names of publications and other basic information should give you a good sense of whether you found at least some of what youd hoped to find.

This search is just one set of sources. Youd probably repeat it using blogs, online news sources and television transcripts. Youd also repeat the search in Factiva to catch the Wall Street Journal, if nothing else.

Reviewing stories
Section In newspapers, opinion pieces are clearly marked as editorial, op-ed, columnist or some other designation in the SECTION of the paper shown. These should rarely be your source for facts. Instead, youll use them as informed opinion in your work. (These columnists usually do original reporting and often have exclusive details. But you should dig deeper if you are trying to find the stories that present the original material.) Here are a few examples from The Washington Post and New York Times after searching for Henry pre/2 Kissinger. The articles that come back include an op-ed
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Public Policy 125 research guide Sarah Cohen

Power searching on LexisNexis Academic

Kissinger wrote about recently released Nixon tapes that included some anti-Semitic statements; a news story in the New York Times that mentioned Kissinger after the START treaty was passed; and another op-ed piece that mentioned Kissinger in the context of opinion. You can tell where these are by examining the SECTION shown in the list. Broadcast transcripts are much more difficult they can include segments of news, exclusive interviews, investigative reports and opinion in the same show. The show itself All Things Considered or 60 Minutes vs. the Larry King Show or Fox and Friends can help guide you. There is little distinction made in most online news sources youll have to read the piece to see whether it is straight news or opinion or some combination. In particular, be on the lookout for credits given to other news organizations youll want to go to that original source. Saving your searches There isnt a way on our version of Nexis to save your search. But you can copy the terms and save them into your own document to repeat later. It is shown at the bottom of the page:

Saving your sources We also cant save our sources and go directly to the ones we want. But LexisNexis does allow creation of direct links to forms and with a little work you can construct a bookmark that will pre-select your favorite sources. Here is one example that includes U.S. newspapers and wire services, transcripts, blogs and web publications. Look for information on the API under help if you want to make your own.3 http://www.lexisnexis.com.proxy.lib.duke. edu/hottopics/lnacademic/?verb=sf&csi= 140954,8421,299488,222647 Using Factiva Most of these concepts translate directly to Factiva. The biggest difference is that you choose the search builder in Factiva, and usually will change the default timing to something longer than three months.

You can copy that whole, long search term into a document and save it for your next visit or for another set of publications.

I had to search around a lot for the codes used here to select the sources these combined sources arent included in the huge downloadable spreadsheet. Instead, I clicked on the I button when I found a source I liked, then looked at its URL to find the part that says csi=, which is the unique identifier for each source.
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Public Policy 125 research guide Sarah Cohen

LexisNexis vs. Factiva : Common search examples

LexisNexis and Factiva allow very similar kinds of searching. This detailed guide to the syntax will help you get exactly the results you need. Many of these options are available on the search forms you dont have to type them. However, typing them out means you can save the queries. This level of precision is not available in the other sources for news articles, notably Americas News Bank, Google, ProQuest or the sites own archives. This search guide assumes you know the basics of Boolean searching, such as the use of AND and OR. In all of these, the quotation marks, parentheses and slashes matter they wont work without them and the error message you get isnt very useful You want A date range In LexisNexis Defaults to entire archive Begins Jan. 1 2010: Date(>12/31/2009) Ends 12/31/2009: Date(<1/1/2009) Its easier to fill out a date range on the form than to type it in it will translate it for you and then you can save it. atleast10(aids OR hiv) atleast10(rural development) In Factiva Defaults to only 3 months be sure to change it. You can only do this on the Search Builder form. Good for Testing your search terms to a manageable set of documents. Once you find better terms, you can change it back.

Many mentions mentions of a term

Not exactly available, but you could use: atleast10 aids OR atleast10 hiv hlp=aids aids/F100/ (refers to first 100 words you can change that. Note the slash at the end.) wc>2000

The term at the top of a story

hlead(aids) (refers to headline and lead paragraphs.) length(>2000)

Limiting to stories that are really about a topic it has many mentions in the story. (Google use this as one but not the only element in ranking) Again limiting to stories that are really about the topic

Long stories (by word count) An author

Byline(sarah cohen)

By=sarah cohen (notice the quotes)

Making sure its a significant story. Choosing 2,000 words may be too much or too little. Start here and move up or down Once you find one good story on a topic, search the byline to see if there are more.

Public Policy 125 research guide Sarah Cohen

 Finding terms near each other (called proximity searches) 1. Valerie pre/2 Plame (no more than 2 words before Plame) 2. Valerie w/4 Wilson (within 4 words, any order) 3. Valerie w/s Wilson (same sentence) or w/p (same paragraph) Pub(washington post or new york times) Truncation: ! Wild card (single character): * Capitalization: ALLCAPS or NOCAPS Examples: allcaps(aids) allcaps(hiv!) hiv*aids NOT (pub(Washington Post)) You dont want any Post stories. (connect with an AND, not an OR) 1. 2. 3. Valerie w/2 Plame Valerie near4 Wilson or Valerie/N4/Wilson Valerie same Wilson (same paragraph) Especially good for peoples names putting a context around common words as someones name, women who sometimes use maiden names, finding couples, and people who sometimes use a middle name. This is good if you have a few sources. I havent found a way to type in ready-made groups that arent on the drop-down lists. Working with common phrases that arent what you intend. Both services automatically adjust for spelling variations and singular / plural. Thats usually good. But in this case, you want to distinguish the common word aid from the disease AIDS, and to adjust for the fact that some sources might have HIV/AIDS instead. Avoid using NOT unless its a real problem, such as easily confused people. In that case, you could exclude, say, a company name that is for the wrong person to avoid some of the confusion. The logic of NOT gets hairy and there are a lot of terms that cant go with it..

A publication name

Spelling variations 1. Truncation (any # of letters at the end) 2. Wild card (each one accounts for only 1 character) Exclusions

* ? No comparable command hiv* or hiv$4 hiv?aids NOT pub=

More help from Nexis: Connectors (eg, AND, OR, NOT, PRE, etc.): http://wiki.lexisnexis.com.proxy.lib.duke.edu/academic/index.php?title=Boolean_Searching Looking in sections of a story (HLEAD, BODY, LENGTH, etc.): http://wiki.lexisnexis.com.proxy.lib.duke.edu/academic/index.php?title=Academic_Document_Sections (however be careful about using the Company name and the index search terms. These are made by computer and arent always right.) More help from Factiva: http://customer.factiva.com.proxy.lib.duke.edu/en/custSvc/CSMain.aspx?id=3463&sa_from=GL http://customer.factiva.com.proxy.lib.duke.edu/en/custSvc/CSMain.aspx?id=3948

Public Policy 125 research guide Sarah Cohen

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