About CQ Researcher Online and Related Resources
CQ Researcher Online
CQ Researcher is often the first source that librarians recommend when researchers are seeking original, comprehensive reporting and analysis on issues in the news. Founded in 1923 as Editorial Research Reports, CQ Researcher is noted for its award-winning in-depth, unbiased coverage of health, social trends, criminal justice, international affairs, education, the environment, technology and the economy. Reports are published online 44 times a year by CQ Press, an imprint of SAGE Publications.
Each single-themed report is researched and written by a seasoned journalist, footnoted and professionally fact checked. The consistent, reader-friendly organization provides researchers with an introductory overview, which poses and addresses relevant questions; a background and chronology on the topic; an assessment of the current situation; tables and maps; a pro/con debate by representatives of opposing positions; and bibliographies of key sources.
CQ Researcher received the American Bar Association's 2002 Silver Gavel Award for a nine-part series on liberty and justice issues, as well as the prestigious Sigma Delta Chi Award for Journalism Excellence in 1999 for a 10-part series on health care. Additional honors awarded to CQ Researcher can be found here.
CQ Researcher Online offers access to CQ Researcher reports dating back ten years. PDF files are available for reports from January 1996; color PDFs are available for reports published after January 2001.
Watch our tutorial video to learn more about using and teaching students how to use CQ Researcher.
Editorial Research Reports
CQ Researcher's predecessor, Editorial Research Reports, was co-founded by Richard M. Boeckel and Bertram Benedict in 1923. As a young Capitol Hill correspondent for the New York Tribune covering the League of Nations debate after World War I, Boeckel realized how little he and his fellow reporters knew about the background of the issues they were following. Because of that "guilty conscience," as he called it, he enlisted two veteran Washington newsmen, Burt P. Garnett and Homer Dodge, to help him establish Editorial Research Reports. With the first weekly issue, dated September 1, 1923, Editorial Research Reports as it was called, began providing in-depth reports on important issues of the day to subscribing newspapers, primarily for the benefit of editorial writers. In 1956, Congressional Quarterly purchased Editorial Research Reports and began publishing it under Boeckel's continued editorial direction and staff. Boeckel served as editor of Editorial Research Reports for 10 more years — 43 in all. In 1991, the publication's name was changed to CQ Researcher.
CQ Researcher Plus Archive
In 2005, CQ Press began digitizing CQ Researcher's archive of more than 3,000 Editorial Research Reports published between 1923 and 1990 in order to offer the entire Researcher collection online. Like CQ Researcher today, each report in the Archive addresses the significance and legacy of the events and issues of its day. And so, Archive content adds a new historical dimension to the CQ Researcher site, extending its coverage beyond politics and current events to the fields of history, sociology, cultural studies, and other social sciences.
To ensure that users get the full benefit of the rich content contained in the Archive, the CQ Researcher site created Issue Tracker, a new browsing tool that lets users trace topics through years and across decades. Issue Tracker allows researchers to quickly gather their research on the historical development of hot topics and events that have shaped the world and explore how issues and institutions have evolved over time.
Since the Archive draws on content that taps far back into other time periods, many older reports reflect the language of the day in which they were written. In some cases, reports use nomenclature or terminology that is no longer used and in some cases could be considered offensive by today's standards. In order to preserve the primary-source nature of these reports and truly reflect the historical times in which they were written, CQ Researcher decided to leave the original language of these older reports unchanged.
For easy access to related reports across time, Issue Tracker can be accessed the Browse Reports menu or within a Researcher report.
CQ Researcher Plus Archive is available as a plug-in purchase for Researcher subscriptions. If your institution subscribes to the Archive, the home-page banner on the CQ Researcher site will display CQ Researcher Plus Archive.
CQ Press hopes that you find this additional content from the CQ Researcher Plus Archive a great value to all your research and classroom activities on key events that have shaped history and today's current events.
For information on subscribing to CQ Researcher or CQ Researcher Plus Archive, please email Librarymktg@sagepub.com or call toll-free 1-800-818-7243.
