The Craft of Research

• Lesson handout

Handout highlights:

1. Crime statistics at the local, state and national levels
2. Inmate statistics and lookup/locator tools (plus parole and probation stats)
3. Most wanted criminals
4. Sex offender registries
5. Criminal court information  
6. Gun violence timelines
7. Death penalty information
8. District Attorneys and lawyers

Along with NYC.gov, the following resources may also help you compile information for your beat memo:

• American Community Survey (Census Bureau)
• Infoshare Online
• ReferenceUSA
• Board of Elections web sites for New York State and New York City

What are Nexis and Factiva?  They are commercial competitors that archive the backfiles of thousands of publications, including newspapers, magazines, newsletters, transcripts and other material, such as major blogs.  (As Barbara Gray said, “the rich man’s Google.”)

• The difference between the two services is not significant.
• Since it’s owned by Dow Jones, Factiva has the exlusive online full text content of the DJ wires, the Wall Street Journal and Reuters wires.
• The command languages are different, but the functions are the same.

 Using the services–key points:

• It is expected that this type of background work should be performed for every work assignment to bring context and details to the story. 
• It should bring to light any article that’s already been written on the topic, person, event or company. 
• For the most part, these publications have been vetted for errors. 
• This is searching the deep web, that which doesn’t show up when search engines crawl the web.  Cannot get this stuff on Google, for the most part.
• It’s all tagged/indexed consistently, resulting in more precise results.

To help you use the services, Barbara has compiled separate guides for Nexis and Factiva.

Jack’s bonus tip: Access World News archives backfiles of many smaller publications not found in Nexis or Factiva, including AM New York, Metro, and the Staten Island Advance back to 1991.  To find where any given publication is archived online, use our Research Center’s E-Journal Search.

•  Lesson handout

Points of emphasis for critical thinking:

1. NYC.gov is going to be a (if not the) primary research source for your Community District.
2. Like almost all government web sites, the bulk of “the good stuff” is buried deep within NYC.gov.  Never think the home page of a government web site is going to be intuitive.  You need to dig.
3. Do you necessarily trust every piece of information released by the government?

Points of emphasis for critical thinking:

1. With many courts at the federal, state and local levels, there is no “one stop shopping” for court research.  In most cases, you’ll need to know the jurisdiction before you can find anything.
2. In many jurisdictions, particularly at the local levels, case information isn’t online at all.  For those cases, you have no choice but to visit the courthouse or contact the court clerk to get info (unless you can get it from participating lawyers).
3. Of the courts that do have case information online, there’s no uniformity.  Some post full case documents.  Others provide only basic docket information.  And many times, you’ll have to use a fee-based service to get the info.
4. For federal cases, PACER is the best place to go.  Although fee-based, it’s relatively inexpensive.  It has both docket information and (most) case documents.  (Note: The Supreme Court has its own no-cost site separate from the PACER system.  Historical SCOTUS info can be found here, here, here, here and here.)   FindLaw is another good site to search Supreme and Circuit Court decisions.  The Federal Judiciary also publishes the very useful Journalist’s Guide to the Federal Courts and Understanding the Federal Courts.
5. LexisNexis has case information for the most jurisdictions–federal, state and local–but not all of it is available in the academic version accessible to CUNY students.
6. Beyond PACER and LexisNexis, you should check individual court sites, such as the New York State Unified Court System’s eCourts, Appellate Courts, SCROLL or Slip Decisions pages, to find out what is and isn’t available online.  (Note: Cornell’s Legal Information Institute has archived New York Court of Appeals decisions.)
7. For higher-profile cases, you can sometimes find court documents posted at sites such as FindLaw, Jurist, MoreLaw or The Smoking Gun.
8. You’ll probably need to talk to them for your story anyway, so if all else fails, lawyers might provide case information.  My favorite sites to find lawyer contacts are LegalDockets and Martindale.com.

The Census Bureau has one of the most valuable and densely-packed web sites you’ll encounter.  Like NYC.gov, it seems you’ll constantly find new information there that will amaze you with its obscurity and level of detail.  Below are some of my favorite Census Bureau pages, with thanks to fellow research colleague Barbara Oliver for her assistance.

• First and foremost is the American FactFinder, which includes fast access to fact sheets for your community, as well as annual American Community Survey data.  The latter provides the best place to get estimates since the last decennial census was undertaken in 2000.  You definitely should familiarize yourself with how to navigate this!
• State and County QuickFacts provides easy access via a map for a quick look at some broad statistics for states, counties and cities.
• The Statistical Abstract is the authoritative and comprehensive summary of statistics on the social, political, and economic organization of the United States.  Note that past years of the publication are also available.
• Facts for Features & Special Editions consist of collections of statistics from the Census Bureau’s demographic and economic subject areas intended to commemorate anniversaries or observances or to provide background information for topics in the news.
• Also worth a look are the United States and World PopClocks, and Frequently Occurring Surnames From Census 2000.  Check to see how common your name is!

Additionally, it’s important to note that there are many excellent “third party” sites that aggregate Census Bureau data.  Below are a few of my favorites in that category.

• The New York City Department of City Planning’s population page has some excellent resources, including American Community Survey data and a map delineating Community Districts and Census Bureau PUMAs.
• Infoshare Online, RAND New York and Social Explorer are three subscription sources we have.  Take advantage of CUNY access!
• The University of Virginia Library has a great Historical Census Browser with data from 1790 to 1960.  Need slave and slaveholder statistics?  (Ugh.)  This is one place to easily find them.
• For news on the 2010 Census, check out the All Things Census blog from the Pew Research Center.

• Lesson handout

Handout highlights:

1. Crime statistics at the local, state and national levels
2. Inmate statistics and lookup/locator tools (plus parole and probation stats)
3. Most wanted criminals
4. Sex offender registries
5. Criminal court information  
6. Gun violence timelines
7. Death penalty information
8. District Attorneys and lawyers

• Lesson handout

Points of emphasis for critical thinking:

1. As you may remember from elementary school, there are three branches of the federal government–executive, legislative and judicial.  For the purposes of this lesson, we’ll be concentrating mainly on executive branch offices and resources.  (The judicial branch will be covered in an upcoming lesson on court research.)
2. The executive branch is comprised of cabinet-level departments (e.g. Secretary of State heads State Department, Secretary of Defense heads Defense Department, etc.).  There are also various bureaus, agencies, administrations, commissions, boards and offices.  Some of these (e.g. Census Bureau, FAA, FBI, FEMA) are part of the executive branch departments.  Others (e.g. CIA, EPA, FCC, FDIC, FEC, NASA, NTSB, SEC) are independent of them.
3. As is the case with NYC.gov, there are many federal government resources and databases not easily found from the main pages of sites, and even if you luck out and find them via a Google search, the information contained within rarely can be found without going to the resource and database pages themselves.  Thus, the more you familiarize yourself with them, the better.
4. Among the most useful federal government resources are those provided by the Census Bureau, which we’ll discuss more during a separate lesson later in the semester.  There are also great databases related to labor, occupational safety, campaign finance, education, health, transportation, crime and business.  See this lesson’s handout for more details.

OK, I’ve updated this post to reflect the fact-checking lesson material as taught.  First, we discussed some of the most common kinds of facts that need to be checked in any story, including numbers and statistics, names, dates, ages, locations, titles and degrees.  Among the kinds of numbers we discussed were the questionable NYPD crime statistics as reported by the New York Times, Daily News and Village Voice (again and again), as well as the 2008-09 and 2009-10 NYU tuition costs from different sources.  We agreed that while data from primary sources–such as the 2008-09 tuition–is preferable, even that is not necessarily accurate, as the NYPD crime statistics controversy shows.  From a research perspective, primary sources generate data, so they’re more likely to be correct, as opposed to secondary sources, which only report data.  Government agencies are a typical primary source.  (You can trust their data as much as you can trust the government.)  News media are a typical secondary source.  The general idea is to be citing primary sources in your stories, where appropriate.  You can also “couch” any questionable data, if necessary.

As far as actually checking facts, we killed three birds with one stone by looking up the name (spelling), age and location of my brother, using the BirthDetails and Can I Vote? web sites.  The first was a useful secondary source, and the second linked to state voter registration sites, which qualify as primary.  This is not the only way to check the facts we did, but it’s a good one.  Another would be DMV records.  Of course, sometimes neither method will be available to you, and then you’d have to use other means.  We also agreed that an employer would be the best (primary) source for checking someone’s title.

Although we didn’t have time to review them, I did promise you links for obtaining military personnel records and a degree verification database.  The former requires a formal “Form 180” request that takes some time to process.  The latter requires a nominal fee to retrieve records.

Last but not least, never forget the two most important fact-checking questions…

1. Are you sure?
2. Says who?

Points of emphasis for critical thinking:

1. There’s more to search engines than just plugging in words.  The best searchers use the advanced features.  There are many places to find Google tips.
2. No mainstream search engines, even Google, search anywhere close to the entire web.  They don’t include every page, nor the entirety of many longer documents.  That’s why you need to familiarize yourself with many of the sources I’ve reviewed this semester.  You can’t rely on Google exclusively.
3. Web sites are not all created equal.  Evaluate, and trust primary sources FIRST.  Sometimes you’ll want to check who owns a web site.
4. Web pages don’t die easily.  Old pages can be treasure troves.
5. The first breakout web search tool was a subject guide.  They are still around and still useful.
6. In addition to the “general” search tools, there are great “specialty” engines too.  Among the best known are Google News, Google Books and YouTube.