A Matter of Fact provides selective excerpts containing statistical statements on a variety of public policy topics, particularly social, economic, political, environmental, and health issues. The statistics are taken from a variety of newspapers, magazines, newsletters, and Web sites. Compared to other services, it provides content that is unique in two ways: first, all excerpts contain statistical evidence; and second, the entries are not abstracts but rather excerpted quotes from the original speaker’s or writer’s statement, so that the statistics are presented in context.
A Matter of Fact contains entries from 1984 to the present. The publications list includes 1,078 serial titles that have been covered for two or more years since 1984. US Congressional hearings are also included. Foreign‐language excerpts for selected sources are included from 1996 forward. The electronic format contains most of the statistical information found in the printed edition, although 3,000 early records have been removed from the database. There are currently 120,000 excerpts, with 8,000 added annually. The titles covered range from international to local, from scholarly to popular, from general to news, from A Profile of Older Americans, AARP Brochure to Zoolife. There are titles on almost any subject imaginable, as well as the US Congressional Record and the Hansards of the Canadian Parliament.
Simple Search, Advanced Search, and Browse options are available. Simple Search provides a single search box, which uses an automatic Boolean AND, with the option to limit the search to subject, title, or author field. Advanced Search provides additional options to select search type (And [the default], Phrase, Or) and display order (Ranked, Alphabetical, Date [reverse chronological order ‐ the default]), and to limit the search by date. In both, right‐hand truncation is available by using an asterisk. Browse provides an alphabetical list of the subject headings and authors in the database with the associated number of entries. Two additional search modes are scheduled for implementation at the beginning of 2001. Power Search will add the NEAR and NOT operators and will increase the number of search boxes to five. Boolean Search will allow straight command‐line searching.
Each entry consists of a “substantive excerpt”: author, article title, a 10‐20‐line paragraph, page number, LC subject headings, source (including inclusive article pages), and ISSN. Users can click on a subject heading or author to redirect the search to other related articles. Many records also include a URL that links to the free full‐text version of the article. It is possible to limit the search to documents containing links to full‐text by including the words “Web links” in the search. At present, this can only be done with an AND search, but the planned addition of search boxes should eliminate this problem.
While there are indeed many documents with links to full‐text, the majority contain links to Thomas from the Congressional Record. The first 50 results from a search on “Social Security” and “Web links” contained 35 from the Congressional Record, four from US News & World Report, three from the Bureau of the Census, two from Statistics Canada, and one each from Eurostat, WHO, USDA, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, the Federal Statistical Office of Germany, and American Demographics. The American Demographics link was from 1998. Excerpts from American Demographics for 2000 are not linked, although the articles are available at no charge online. Links are not provided where the entire issue is online in PDF format, such as the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin and DOE This Month. Articles from US News & World Report are linked, but those from Time or Forbes are not. There may be good reasons for the inclusions and omissions, but they are not explained, and users will expect more full‐text links to sources that are freely available.
This is not to demean the links from the Congressional Record, which are extremely valuable. All results do indeed contain statistical evidence to support their statements. It should be noted that this is not a database to consult to find specific statistics ‐ for example, the number of people on Social Security or their average income. The data may appear in an excerpt to support a statement, but users cannot search for it explicitly. Broader searching and then browsing through the results seems called for: a search for “social and security and disability” brought up 199 hits, all of which contained statistical data on some aspect of the topic. Also, as is the case for any databases with controlled vocabularies, it is highly recommended that users redirect the search using the subject headings assigned to an entry that is right on target.
A Matter of Fact fulfills its promise of selecting only documents containing statistical evidence and of providing it in context. In partial context, that is, for without a link to the full‐text, the context of the larger article is absent. But this is an improvement over citing “facts” from the abstract alone! If you want statistics to go with public policy‐related statements, this is a very useful database.
Betty Landesman
Manager, Document Delivery Team, Research Information Center, AARP, Washington, DC
