PolicyFile is a searchable database of over 32,000 abstracts dealing with public policy research and analysis. The data indexed comes from over 300 state, national, and international organizations, including public policy think tanks, institutes, foundations, banks, university research programs, and publishers. The organizations listed range alphabetically from ACCESS to the Worldwatch Institute, and include all areas of the ideological spectrum. The more than 70 broad subjects covered include affirmative action, aging, arms control, civil rights,consumer issues, drugs, economic policy, education, the European Union, international trade, health policy, human rights, immigration, intelligence, the Middle East, military strategy, reproductive issues, science and technology policy, social security, telecommunications, terrorism, urban policy, and women.
Each citation contains information about the organization (with hot links to the organizational Web site and e‐mail addresses), document title, authors, completion date, status, price (if available), length (if available), subjects, document number (may be a series or a journal issue), document URL (if available), language, record date, and abstract. Although language is indicated for each citation, I was unable to locate any documents in languages other than English.
There are direct hotlinks to the full document for many of the citations. The exact percentage is not known, as this depends on the policy of the organization issuing a document, but more than half of the documents indexed are freely available. In an admittedly unscientific sampling, I did a search on “Medicare” and looked at the first ten citations. Of these ten, two were from the Heritage Foundation; one from the Democratic Leadership Council and Progressive Policy Institute; three from GAO; two from the National Bureau of Economic Research; one from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting; and one from the Brookings Institution. NBER documents are only free to subscribers, so in this case the link took me to information on cost and ordering. The Brookings citation was to the proceedings of a conference which is not available online; in this case there was no document URL, but there was an indication of the price of the proceedings. The document URLs for the other seven documents took me directly to the document itself on the organization’s Web site.
The site is fairly simple in design with a judicious use of colors. The initial page has a general description of the database, with links to Headlines (selected documents added in the past two weeks; also sent to subscribers via e‐mail) and signing up for a free trial. There are buttons to go to the Chadwyck‐Healey home page, About, More information, Search, Help, Terms and conditions, How to contribute, and Other Web resources. This last is a fairly abbreviated and unannotated list of links to government and media sites.
The search screen is straightforward. There are search boxes for Keyword search, Keyword in field, Browse subjects, and Browse organization. Entering a search term in the Keyword search box will search the entire database. The search can be further limited by adding a “keyword in field”: fields available are Completion date, Title, and Authors. The user can also selecting a [single] subject term and/or a [single] organization from the browsable lists to narrow the search to citations containing that subject term and/or from that organization. If the user does not wish to enter a keyword, he/she can browse all citations on a subject or all citations from an organization.
Boolean AND, OR, and NOT are available. A careful reading of the help text is recommended to determine the exact syntax to be used in order to avoid potential surprises. For example, a phrase search must be surrounded by square brackets; without the brackets, the words are interpreted as having an AND between them. There are single‐ and multiple‐character wildcard symbols. There is supposed to be a numeric search capability, e.g. Completion date > 1999, but I was unable to make it work. Limiting by a single year does work. There is an interesting “fuzzy” search available if there are alternate spellings for a word: {fuzzy} labour retrieves both labour and labor. A very sophisticated proximity search to look for words or phrases within a specified proximity of each other is also available, but it is quite complicated and in my opinion only to be used when really needed for a particular search.
The user has the choice of seeing 10, 20, 30, 40, or 50 results per page returned. The default display is Detailed, which includes the title of the document, the organization, the completion date, the subjects assigned to it, and up to approximately ten lines of the abstract. Other display options are Summary, which is limited to the title, the organization, and the completion date, and Entire page, which takes the user directly to the full citation.
Search results are returned in what at first appears to be reverse chronological order by document date, with a lot of exceptions, but which turns out to be in reverse chronological order by date entered. Returning to the “Medicare” search mentioned earlier, the first ten results have completion dates of February 17, 2000, February 18, 2000, Spring 2000 [all entered March 3, 2000, December 14, 1999, October 12, 1999, January 31, 2000, February 2000 [all entered February 25, 2000], February 14, 2000 [entered February 18, 2000, January 2000], and 2000 [both entered February 11, 2000]. The user mostly sees the most recent documents first, but the order can be confusing to decipher. In addition, the user is never told how many citations match his/her search. This makes it impossible to know whether he/she needs to narrow the search without looking at quite a few citations. I find this to be the biggest drawback in what is otherwise a generally well‐designed system.
I am not aware of a comparable product in this field. All of the documents indexed are either publicly available or referenced on each organization’s Web site, but individual sites have differing search capabilities; in addition, a researcher would need to know which sites have the documents he/she wants. Some of the documents (particularly the journal articles and books) will be referenced in traditional abstracting and indexing sources, but many will not. The freely‐available Policy.com Web site does provide a similar service. There is a searchable issues library, and there are links to the Web sites of many of the same organizations. However, there is no overall search engine to get at all the documents available on all the sites. The value that PolicyFile adds is the comprehensive indexing and abstracting of information from many sites in a single search, as well as a controlled subject vocabulary. Highly recommended for academic and other libraries whose patrons are doing research in public policy.
