Current Events

Current events topics can be the most difficult to find information on simply because there is a vast overabundance of current events articles and information sources. It can be frustrating to find relevant and unbiased pieces in the sea of editorials, sensationalism, and articles. There are several approaches to current events research that are highly effective at filtering out the noise of the world media and finding solid information and informed opinions.

The first rule of researching current events is to toss aside most of the popular general current events news sources after a cursory glance. Popular news magazines such as Time, Newsweek, and US News and World Report have good basic information for beginners, but advanced researchers will find very little new information within their pages. Most newspapers fall into this same category of having reliable general information without much depth. A handful of national newspapers and magazines break this mold because they can rely on a much larger pool of resources due to their huge subscription base. Other popular general news sources get most if not all of their articles directly from the Associated Press, Reuters, UPI, or a selection of other international news agencies. Large news sources have the resources to directly do their own reporting and research and usually can pay for experienced experts to write articles for key subjects. So with the exception of large newspapers such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, or Washington Post, most general newspapers will not provide much analysis or unique data. General news magazines tend to run into the same problem, with the exception of the Economist and a few others. However, even these higher level newspapers and magazines tend to simply summarize events and deeper analysis. Research requiring more detailed analysis will require a different approach.

For that reason, the international news agencies are usually the best place for researchers to get the most current raw information. Most of these agencies to not provide anything more than a cursory analysis, instead sending news briefs and summaries onto the wire as soon as a correspondent on site can type a few paragraphs into the server. The best place to search the releases from news agencies is Lexus-Nexus, an Internet service available at most libraries and colleges in the United States.

Analysis deeper than summarization can be found in books and scholarly journals. Unless luck finds a very recently published book on the research subject, it is sometimes difficult to find completely up to date current events books. Most topics have a book horizon around five years, meaning books up to five years old should be adequate for relevant analysis. However, every topic has unique needs, depending on how sensitive the topic is to change over time. For example, one would be hard pressed to find a book analyzing an economic reform package less than a year old, but there are hundreds of books from the last fifty years discussing the basis for the conflict in the Middle East.

Scholarly journals in general offer the highest level of current events analysis, but it can be difficult to find good articles in the thousands of available publications. Most colleges and some public libraries provide access to Internet search engines specifically designed to find articles in scholarly journals. However, these still tend to be unreliable and do not include many of the best available journals. Sadly, one of the fastest and most effective ways to find articles in scholarly journals for current events is to simply select a few journals that are specific to the topic (for example, the Middle East Journal) and flip through the tables of contents for the last several years. This really is not that tedious since most journals print the TOC on the cover, only have eight to ten articles per issue, and only have two to six issues per year. With access to a large college library, this can yield a variety of articles and sources in only a few minutes if the topic is not too specific. As a general rule of thumb, there is such a plethora of scholarly journals that there is almost always one specific to the topic at hand.

Current events research is about more than finding a bunch of popular sources that all say more or less the same thing. It is simple to find a huge supply of indepth analyses on almost any topic if the effort is made to look in the right places.