Gender & Democracy in Russia, Eurasia & Beyond : Research Strategies & Sources  Tags: slavic russian women_and_politics women_and_media gender_studies  

ISI contains an amazing breadth and depth of full-text business-related information, broadly defined, although chronological coverage is heavily skewed toward the very recent past. Items can be found dating back to the mid-1990s, but the vast majority of material dates from the past two years.

• Current, full-text, vernacular-language coverage of 70+ countries, including all of Eastern Europe and (almost all of) the former Soviet Union
• "Unique content," including full-text news articles, financial statements, company information, industry analyses, equity quotes, market-specific information, as well as proprietary research, analysis, and statistics
• Content aggregated from from 2,150+ data providers, representing 13,000+ local & regional information sources
• Updated daily
• Very little retrospective information
• the entire Kodeks Russian law database is included in ISI, along with major statistical packages, etc., etc.
  

Although materials relating to larger geographical regions can be searched and reviewed, ISI is primarily organized on a country-by-country basis, with a wide range of search options and types of materials accessible within each country. Clicking on Belarus', for example, takes the user to the following search screen (click to enlarge):

Among many other options here, users can select "Latest News/NewsWatch" from the "News" portion of the menu bar, which retrieves links to a huge amount of same-day information on a

variety of topics. The following image contains the first part of the list for May 27th, 2008.

All ISI materials are full-text, as in the following example from May 27th.

Note that ISI does not provide access to materials written in Belarusian. This is the case for many CIS countries, which ISI tends to cover with English- and Russian-language materials only. Information for Eastern European countries is provided in both English and the major languages of the country in question in most cases.

The amount of information available via ISI can be overwhelming. ISI's own User Guide, available in the menu bar at the upper right of the screen (see below), can help users navigate the database more effectively.

The User Guide's table of contents is reproduced below to provide a more complete sense of how ISI is organized.