RIA Checkpoint

RIA Checkpoint offers primary tax documents and secondary analysis for federal, state, and local taxation, estate planning, pensions, international taxation, and more. RIA and Warren, Gorham & Lamont (WG&L), two top names in primary and analytical research publishing, anchor this database.

RIA Checkpoint is organized by tabs: Research, Newsstand, and Tools. Within the Research section, the user may search RIA analytical and editorial material, legislation (including archives), primary tax resources (codes, regulations, etc.), and news/current awareness (including WG&L publications). From the Newsstand tab, the user may access the latest editions of daily tax updates, such as RIA Federal taxes Weekly, Cummings' Corporate Tax Insights, and State & Local Tax Weekly. The Tools tab offers the user calculators from various categories, including mortgages, taxes, and retirement savings.

To begin a search, select the Research tab. The categories included within RIA's well-known Editorial Materials are Citator, Coordinator, and Handbook, as well as annotations and explanations which accompany the United States Tax Reporter. Tables and rates and form/line finders are also available.

Primary source material includes the Internal Revenue Code, Treasury Regulations, Congressional Committee Reports, Current Pending/Enacted Legislation, Federal Tax Cases, IRS Practice materials (RIA's), IRS Publications, IRS Rulings and Releases (starting in the 1950s), U.S. Tax Treaties in Force.
Legislative materials include annual analysis of major tax acts starting in 1996 through the current year. Committee Reports, enact legislation, General Explanation of Tax legislation Enacted (Blue Books), pending legislation, and Table of Code Sections Amended are provided beginning with the 104th through the current Congress.

News/Current Awareness includes daily news plus the searchable text of WG&L's Journal of Corporate Taxation, Journal of Taxation, and Practical Tax Strategies/Taxation for Accountants.
Research Hint: RIA Checkpoint allows searching by citation. (The default search is keyword).
-Choose the Research tab.
-From the left column, select the appropriate source type. For example, Code & Regs, Cases, or Rulings/IRB.
-Appropriate boxes with sample citation formats open for the user to input.

[FIND RIA Checkpoint in our "Databases by Subject" List on the first column of the "Business and Management" page.]

Notable E-Book: Market Share Reporter

Market share, the proportion of total sales of a product accounted for by an individual brand, is one of those benchmarks business folk like to look at to get a sense of how one company stacks up against their competition. Actual data is often embedded in reports and articles, and so it is not always that easy to come up with. One excellent source, since 1991, has been Gale's Market Share Reporter (MSR), an annual printed compendium that Sawyer Library has had since its earliest days.

Just recently, we moved this from a print subscription to an e-book standing order, to allow students and faculty to make use of the resource 24/7, from wherever they happen to be. Available on Gale's "Directory Library" platform, we have profiled the MSR so that you can search that alone.

The default option is to search only the latest volume. But if you want to search several years at once, simply control-click several years in the Editions box in the lower middle of the page. (I have selected both the 2009 and 2010 editions in the screenshot above.)

Once you have selected the years you wish to search, just put search terms into the yellow Quick Search box to the left. Do multiple brands (for example, ford and general motors), a type of product (for example, soft drinks), or whatever else seems appropriate. Note that once you click on a results item, you will see not only a table or chart with information, but also active links below that allow you to explore the SIC or NAICS [government industry] code that might get you more useful hits--ones that don't come up with a keyword search.

Our online file goes back to 2000, so any figures of recent vintage should be available online. We also have older volumes in the Reference stacks, should you be interested in consulting them for older figures. And if you'd like a publisher description of MSR, you can find one here.

MSR is a very valuable resource, but since it is only produced once a year, the data will not be the VERY latest. So keep in mind that there are other ways to get market share information. These include going to a major database like Business Source Complete and searching for your company or brand and market share (for example, nike and market share). The TableBase module in RDS Business Suite is also a good source of market share data in a relatively clean form. The unwieldy database from Euromonitor called Global Market Information Database (GMID) is also chock full of useful data....once you find it.

When you are searching for market share information, explore all of your options, including the now-available online version of Market Share Reporter.

New Database Component: Sage Handbook Collection

Sawyer Library was an early adopter of the Sage eReference collection. We have found this extensive set of good quality subject encyclopedias, covering a wide range of topics, to be an excellent source of 24/7 online reference material. The Sage set offers a valuable complement to other wide-ranging eReference collections like our Gale Virtual Reference Library and Credo Reference.

And now, Sage eReference has augmented their encyclopedia sets with an array of their reference handbooks. Sawyer Library has purchased this new collection to give additional depth and breadth to your Sage eReference research options. This online Handbook Collection contains 80 authoritative, award–winning, international and interdisciplinary handbooks across the social sciences--with ever-increasing coverage of business and public management topics, as well as disciplines that Sage has long been known for, like Communication and Sociology. Handbooks cover a great variety of subject areas, including: Advertising, Children, Culture, and Violence, Curriculum and Instruction, Conflict Communication, Disability Studies, Global Supply Chain Management, International Relations, Marketing Research, Political Theory, Public Administration, Social Problems and Transnational Crime & Justice.

From the opening screen, you can browse Encyclopedias or Handbooks separately. Or pick one of the blue-linked subject categories to the right of the homepage to see titles from both the Encyclopedias and Handbooks that are likely to be of use. Of course, you can also just plug a simple keyword search into the search box in the middle of the opening page to search across all content. If you want to limit your search to just handbooks or just encyclopedias, you can pick this as an option in Advanced Search (look for the link below the basic search box). Advanced Search is also where you can cherry-pick just the volumes you want to consult.

Although Advanced Search can be useful in some instances, I have always found the Basic Search on the homepage to do a fine job of relevancy ranking. Usually the items I would most want to see are near the top of the results list. So Sage eReference is one of those electronic resources where a quick search often does the trick in getting several good short overviews of appropriate research topics.

We hope that you find this sizable supplement to Sage eReference useful to your research!

[FIND all of Sage eReference on the "Databases by Subject" List in the left column of our "E-Books" page. ]

Did you know... that Google offers a translation function?

Did you know... that Google offers a translation function that enables the translation of webpages and text into 51 languages? Available languages include those that use non-Roman alphabets, such as Arabic, Chinese and Russian. Users may enter text or a webpage URL (including PDF files posted to the web - such as Library Guides), and then choose the appropriate origin and target languages. Similarly, if you see a Google Translate widget on a website (as, for example, on this blog), then you can have the entire page translated instantaneously, ... into German or Icelandic for example!

How good are the translations? Well, they are not perfect, and they often need a good deal of proofreading and polishing, but they are fast. Google Translate is likely to be the most useful, when one needs help understanding text written in a language that the user has at least some familiarity with.

New Database: MEDLINE with Full Text

For medical research, no database can match the depth and scope of MEDLINE, the index created by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM). "Approximately 5,200 journals published in the United States and more than 80 other countries have been selected and are currently indexed for MEDLINE. A distinctive feature of MEDLINE is that the records are indexed with NLM's controlled vocabulary, the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)."

Although some people prefer the immediacy and platform design of the NLM's related free database, PubMed, MEDLINE is the formal database that most libraries offer for biomedical research. (For more of the difference between PubMed and MEDLINE, see this NLM webpage.) Since MEDLINE is only an indexing and abstracting service, Sawyer Library has recently added a new version that enhances and expands the full-text journal component of this valuable resource. Our new database is called MEDLINE with Full Text.

EBSCOhost, the producer (and our most familiar provider of databases) says "MEDLINE with Full Text provides authoritative medical information on medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, pre-clinical sciences, and much more. MEDLINE with Full Text is also the world's most comprehensive source of full text for medical journals, providing full text for more than 1,450 journals indexed in MEDLINE. Of those, more than 1,430 have cover-to-cover indexing in MEDLINE, and of those, 553 are not found with full text in any version of Academic Search" or our other EBSCOhost electronic resources. (If you'd like to see the journal list, Ebsco has posted a PDF of it here.)

When you access the database, you will notice that although it looks somewhat like the familiar EBSCOhost interface, the search screen offers many more options. The opening field box allows you to search for everything from a GS (Gene Symbol) to an MJ (Word in a Major Subject Heading). And the limiting options below allow you to filter for human/animal study, gender, age, journal subject subset, and several other factors. When you get too many results, utilizing these variables can help you focus and search. However, doing a simple keyword combination also works. And once you do this, you can always further limit by clicking the most appropriate "Subject: Major Heading" in the left frame of your results page.

You can also limit to Full Text in the right frame, but this can be inadvisable, because although Ebsco may not have the rights to the full text, you may still be able to link to the article using our Serial Solutions 360 or custom links to other databases like Oxford Journals, SpringerLink or Wiley Interscience or the link to the library online catalog.

For those looking for a less technical approach to medical research for personal use, or for a basic English 101 paper or the like, our Health and Wellness Resource Center (another recent addition) might be a better choice. It includes many basic medical encyclopedias and dictionaries, as well as magazines and journals. Other useful Sawyer Library databases for medical research are Health Reference Center-Academic and HighWire.

We hope that you will make use of MEDLINE with Full Text the next time you are researching a medically-related topic.

[FIND MEDLINE with Full Text on our "Databases by Subject" List on the second column of our "Sciences" page. ]

Notable E-book: American Ethnic Writers

It's always been easy enough to research well-established literary writers of the the type I generally refer to as "Dead White Guys." Esteemed writers like William Shakespeare, Nathaniel Hawthorne and John Milton have been read and studied by English students for a hundred years or more. Scores of scholarly treatises have been written about their lives and work. So, if you do a bit of research in any of our literature databases, you will find materials on the symbolism of "The Minister's Black Veil" without undo effort.

But in the last thirty years, the editors of literary anthologies and many college professors have tried to widen the spectrum of authors that students read. They have rediscovered "lost" women writers like Charlotte Perkins Gilman and looked to contemporary writers of every race and ethnicity to expand our experience of literature.

The problem is that it takes a long period of time for a body of literary criticism to develop around a particular author. And sometimes it is still hard to find even a short overview of a contemporary "minority" author who might appear in a textbook anthology.

One three volume set, published by Magill/Salem Press, and available on our GVRL platform, helps fill the gap. It is American Ethnic Writers, Revised Edition, published earlier this year. As the editors claim: "This edition of American Ethnic Writers covers not only the core writers and the classics of African American, Asian American, Hispanic/Latino, Jewish American, and Native American novels, short stories, plays, and poetry—but many recent voices as well." They continue that "all major American minority cultures are covered: African American, Asian American, Jewish American, Hispanic/Latino, Native American; the set also includes 94 women. The authors represented here are identified with one or more of the following ethnicities: African American (103), Caribbean (5), Chilean American (1), Chinese American (14), Cuban American (7), Dominican American (1), Filipino American (4), Japanese American (7), Jewish American (31), Korean American (1), Mexican American (24), Native American (20), Peruvian American (2), Puerto Rican (12), South and Southeast Asian American (6), Spanish American (1), and Vietnamese American (1)."

So, yes, you will find Sandra Cisneros and Gish Jen profiled here. And, clearly an attempt has been made to represent many forms of diversity beyond obvious racial/ethnic heritage, too. Gay authors like Harvey Fierstein and radical feminist writers like Andrea Dworkin can be found here. (Both are conveniently identified as "Jewish.") But even writers who are simply multicultural in their approach to literature and life are included, like the "Euro-American" Barbara Kingsolver.

To use the book, just click on the link in our online catalog entry. You can then either plug the name of the author you want into the "Search....within this publication" box to the left. Or you can browse authors using the "eTable of Contents" link in the middle of the opening page. The entries are clearly written, but brief. A good starting point for your interest and research. But don't forget to explore those previously mentioned literature databases to (hopefully) find more materials in the journal and reference book literature. And keep in mind that your author might be profiled in some other ebooks in our GVRL collection, as well.

New Database: Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center

Sawyer Library recently added a new database via the Boston Region contract that will be a helpful tool for anyone researching contemporary "hot button" social issues, with an eye towards a balanced, both-sides approach to coverage.

Called Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center, it is, according to the publisher Gale/Cengage, "a full-text resource covering today’s hottest social issues, from Terrorism to Endangered Species, Stem Cell Research to Gun Control. Drawing on acclaimed series published by Greenhaven Press and other Gale imprints, Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center brings together all the information that’s needed to fully understand an issue: pro and con viewpoint articles, reference articles that provide context, full-text magazines, academic journals, and newspapers, primary source documents, government and organizational statistics, multimedia, including images and podcasts, links to hand-selected web sites, and more."

The database is very user-friendly. When you go to the opening screen you will notice that there is a long, two-column list of some of the most "popular" topics. But you can also do your own basic search using the box on the left.

Let's say that even though I see "Animal Rights" listed in the hot topics, I decide to look for materials that speak directly to vegetarianism. If I do a basic search for that

The default tab is the "Viewpoints" section that presents arguments about the topic, like the entry "Human Consumption of Animals is Immoral" from a 1999 Opposing Viewpoint Digest. More up-to-date materials are also available, like an item entitled "A Vegan Lifestyle Is Necessary to Stop the Mistreatment of Animals" by Bruce Friedrich, from Current Controversies: Rights of Animals, 2009.

And note those other colorful tabs above the results that lead to materials like "Reference Books," "Academic Journals" and "Statistics." For different topics you will find more or less material of various levels of usefulness at these other tabs.

Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center is just another tool for those interested in a pro-con debate-oriented presentation of social topics. CQ Researcher is another excellent source for both sides to key social issues. And a periodical available through Academic Search Complete, called Congressional Digest, is another very useful pro-con resource.

For more on Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center, you can take a look at some materials prepared by the publisher: An Overview Factsheet PDF, A Search Tips Guide, and A PowerPoint Demonstration of database use.

[FIND Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center on our "Databases by Subject" List on the second column of our "Social Sciences" list. ]