The utility of reuters for events analysis in area studies: The case of Zambia‐Zimbabwe interactions, 1982--1993

Principal investigators in the Global Events Data System project (GEDS) and others have argued that Reuters Library Report is a superior global source of events data because its coverage of the world's regions is relatively even and it is easily accessible on‐line for automated or semi‐automated coding. The question if Reuters should be coded in conjunction with regional and local sources is left open. We test three expectations: Reuters yields a greater number of events as well as more even reporting across COPDAB issue‐areas than a regional and a local source; Reuters has high face validity; and analysis of data from Reuters , a regional, and a local source will yield very different results. We perform tests of the ‘concurrence’ of data from Reuters, Africa Research Bulletin , and the Zimbabwe Herald covering interactions between Zambia and Zimbabwe from January 1st 1982 to December 31st 1993. Interrupted ARIMA time series and OLS measures of covariation are used to test whether substantive results change depending on the source(s) used. Reuters yields the highest number of events, but the frequency of events varies greatly and so did the emphasis on different COPDAB issue‐areas. Reuters does not tend to report the same events as the regional and local sources; it has low face validity for selected quarters and leads to very different inferences from those based on data from all three sources. These results indicate that Reuters is not a substitute for traditional newspaper sources but an important source to use in conjunction with them.