Learning Outcomes
Understand coverage criteria for News, Blogs, Forums and Review Sites.
Pulsar gives you the ability to search for data from News, Blogs, Forums and Review Sites. In this article, we are providing some standards you need to keep in mind when it comes to making searches using the above in your sources.
Excluded sites from the News coverage index include the following:
Mouthpiece/self-promotional sites (sites that produce only news about the organization for which it is owned)
Corporate domains and websites
PR Wire Services
Universities
Government Agencies
Non-Governmental-Organizations (NGOs) such as unions and charitable organizations
There are some exceptions to the exclusions:
Definitely covered are news publications by universities on topics that go beyond themselves, and are educational, for example, Harvard Business Review (www.hbr.org).
Also monitored are college student newspapers and college alumni magazines (if they are accessible online).
Also covered are topical publications from government agencies, such as CDC MMR Weekly Report (http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/mmwr_wk.html).
Also covered are educational (not propaganda) publications from not-for-profit organizations e.g. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/. The start page for these publications should be the subdomain or directory for the publication itself, not the organization.
Also covered are corporate-sponsored publications that are not self-serving and provide education, for example, http://www.curetoday.com/, which is owned and sponsored by McKeeson, but editorially independent.
Employee publications are not covered and most are not available on the web and all are “mouthpiece” sites.
Online Portals. Portals are a special category and are massive sites with many services in addition to News. The contents of the full portal are NOT covered, for example, http://www.yahoo.com but the news directories would be covered, e.g. https://news.yahoo.com.
Blogs
A blog site is typically a personal or informal site created by a single author or small group of authors. The content is presented in a top-down manner, consisting of chronologically separated posts, often displayed in a running, single column.
Multi-author blogs are also common with posts written by large numbers of authors and professionally edited. Sites from newspapers, other media outlets, universities, think tanks, advocacy groups, and similar institutions are common.
Blogs are usually managed using authoring tools (e.g. WordPress, TypePad) and may or may not be hosted on a blogging platform (e.g. Blogger, Tumblr, Medium or Ameba).
In order to be collected, a blog should meet certain criteria:
A blog MUST have a valid RSS/Atom feed with full or partial text of the most recent blog posts.
Feeds that contain only post titles are not eligible for coverage.
The blog should publish original posts, which are not determined to be spam, adult, aggregated (originating from another source/linked content), downloads, or nonsensical material.
Forums
Forums or message boards are online discussion sites where people can participate in conversations in the form of posted messages. The conversations are typically organized in a hierarchical or tree-like structure. There can be multiple forums or sub-forums on a site, usually covering specific topics. Conversations are started by posting to a forum. Other users can then reply and the ensuing discussion is commonly referred to as a “thread”.
Nearly all sources collected in Forums have the characteristics defined above.
Reviews
Review sites that we cover are most often consumer review sites. These sites will typically have one or more items, which users can share their opinion on with a rating and/or a text description of the product(s) being reviewed. Some sites also allow for continued discussion where other users or a representative of the product/company may give feedback on a user review. This follow-up discussion is not captured.
A few examples of review sites:
Any other special rules?
If an article is on a site that the data provider has only recently added and made available to be collected from, any published articles that would match your search keywords criteria we will surface this.
However, they will be dated and time-stamped to the first day that the site was made available by the data provider.