So much of the research done today focuses on resources that can be accessed online, digital information that can be found and analyzed quickly... often from home on a snowy day while wearing pajamas.
As convenient as it is, relying solely on online information introduces a dangerous bias in research. It's true that an increasing amount of older information is being digitized every day, but that is still just a tiny sample of all the information that has been produced. Limiting your research to only online sources introduces a shortsightedness that can affect your conclusions and your decisions.
Paradoxically, I say all that as preamble to a post about yet another online resource, but the database I'm highlighting exists in part to help correct the myopia: GFDatabase.
It's been a couple months since I first announced our new subscription to GFDatabase, a source for global economic & financial data spanning decades — centuries in many cases!
To help entice those who haven't yet explored GFDatabase, I thought I'd highlight the value of the long-long-long-range perspective that it provides...
The wealth of online data published in and about the last few decades is, of course, wonderful and has deeply changed the type and amount of research we can do.
However, that flood of data about the recent past can result in myopic research: if information is not online and in a form that's easy to integrate and analyse with other data, then it may not even be seen, producing research conclusions that miss long-term trends. We are constantly seeking ways to fill this gap in older online information.
I am very pleased to announce that SFU researchers now have access to economic and financial time series data that spans decades — centuries in many cases: GFDatabase!
