Carol Liebler, professor of communications, co-authored the paper, “Database use, database discrepancies: Implications for content analyses of news” with two Syracuse University graduate students, Kyle Webster and the late Noah Buntain. The paper was published in Newspaper Research Journal.
The purpose of this research is twofold. Study I assesses content analyses of news (2015–2020) that sampled from databases to see which are used most frequently and to observe how researchers justify and contextualize their database choices. Results indicate that Nexis Uni is the database most commonly employed, and that researchers rarely justify their choice or include mention of database limitations. Next, Study II compares Factiva, Google News, NewsBank, Nexis Uni and ProQuest, finding considerable differences in number of stories, geographic reach, media type and coverage of a specific news event.