About

The FOCUSdata project was created by the Security Studies Department at New Jersey City University (NJCU) working with the Rutgers University Center for Critical Intelligence Studies under a grant from the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). The information we provide here is for non-commercial, academic research purposes only.

Our databases include:

  • China: Global Times (9 April 2009 – 21 Feb. 2020, just under 600,000 articles), People’s Daily (29 June 2007 – 22 Feb 2020, 190,000 articles) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (15 Nov 2000 – 25 Dec 2019, 750 speeches and communiques).
  • Iran: Islamic Republic News Agency (22 Dec 2011 – 15 Feb 2020, just over 100,000 articles) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1 Jan 2018 – 15 Feb 2020, just under 1700 statements).
  • North Korea: Korean Central News Agency (KCNA, 1 Oct 2008 – 27 Feb 2020, 85,000 articles) and Rodong Sinmun (2 Jan 2018 – 31 Dec 2019, 7100 articles).
  • Russia: Sputnik (2 June 2019 – 16 Jan 2020, 30,000 articles), Russia Today (21 June 2006 – 9 Jan 2020, 212,000 articles), and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (20 May 2004 – 15 Jan 2020, 21,000 articles).

The data was collected in-house or through the purchase of web scraping services from Scrapinghub (North Korea) and Marquee Data (Russia and China). The sentiment analysis was conducted using Google Natural Language tools and/or MeaningCloud. Topic analysis was conducted using Wordstat 8.0 and/or MeaningCloud. See the specific databases for more details.

 

A note on search terms and topics: Searches of a database for a specific term will return the number of articles that contain that term, typically displayed by month and year. If a term is mentioned multiple times in an article, it still counts as only one article with that term. Topics are different. Topics are a tracked and reported by occurrences of the individual term, which can include multiple mentions in a single article.

For example, searching the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs database for ‘African countries’ returns the number of articles that contain that term, displayed by month and year. The same database also has an ‘African countries’ topic that contains numerous related terms (e.g. African countries, Africa, South Africa, China-Africa relations, etc.) and returns the number of mentions of those terms, which can be more than once per article. 

 

To cite this service: The University of Michigan provides a useful guide for citing data. We follow those guidelines here; please see below for related information and examples. As always, refer to your intended publication for specific guidance.

Authors: Fisher, Scott and Klein, Graig
Title: Use the title of the specific database (e.g. Russia’s Sputnik News, China’s Global Times, North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA))
Year of Publication: April 2020
Publisher: FOCUSdata Project
Edition or Version: Unless otherwise noted, all databases are 1st Edition.
Access information: Use the URL of the database you are citing (e.g. https://focusdataproject.com/russia/russias-sputnik-news/)
Additional information: The FOCUSdata Project is hosted by the Professional Security Studies Department at New Jersey City University in Jersey City, NJ.

APA Example
Fisher, Scott and Klein, Graig (2020). Russia’s Sputnik News (1st Edition) [data file].

MLA Example
Fisher, Scott and Klein, Graig. Russia’s Sputnik News. 1st Edition. Focusdata Project, 2020. Web. 15 April 2020.