Database Search Results Can Differ from Newspaper Microfilm

Abstract

The results of this study should raise some concerns for researchers who assume that a database always accurately reflects the print edition of The New York Times.

Content Analysis of News Analyses

“…Most articles (83.5%) used a single database, but those articles that used more than one database often used Nexis Uni and LexisNexis products with ProQuest (Buntain et al, 2023). Both this study and Youngblood, et al (2013) found LexisNexis Academic/Nexis Uni to be the most popular resource amongst communication and journalism scholars' news analyses.…”

“…Sampling involves developing a subset of content that is representative of the population, helping researchers economize their efforts (Krippendorff, 2004, p. 84). Prior research shows that U.S. scholars of the mass communication and journalism disciplines tend to develop their samples with content from major print legacy news outlets, newspapers that originated in print, like The New York Times, The Washington Post, or USA Today (Riffe & Freitag, 1997;Youngblood et al, 2013). A study of dissertations and theses that used newspapers in the research found that the majority (67%) used only newspapers from the U.S., 23% used non-U.S. newspapers, and about 10% used both (Feeney, 2014).…”

“…The authors of the present study could only find two papers that analyzed the resources used to build samples for news analyses. First, Youngblood et al (2013) found that from 2007 to 2011, the Newspaper Research Journal published 31 content analysis publications that used articles from The New York Times in their samples. Twenty of the 31 articles described how they access The New York Times: 18 of the 20 articles used LexisNexis Academic, and two used hard copy papers or microfilm.…”

On the Replicability of Data Collection Using Online News Databases

“…3 There is a small but important body of literature that examines the databases themselves. This includes research that analyzes the similarities in news stories among databases (Weaver and Bimber 2008); the overlap in stories from the same news sources between databases and physical print (Ridout, Fowler, and Searles 2012); and the overlap in content availability between databases and microfilm (Youngblood, Bishop, and Worthington 2013). Existing work, however, has not examined how databases change over time or how those changes affect the discipline.…”

Preserving news apps present huge challenges

“…Loss of information is of particular interest to communication scholars who use full-text databases, created by aggregators such as Lexis-Nexis Academic or EBSCOhost, to acquire material for content analysis. Youngblood et al 8 write that media researchers assume-incorrectly-that the database version of a newspaper is identical to the print version. They argue that the mismatch has substantial implications for content analysis.…”