RAND began in 1946 as a research project (Project Rand) backed by a single client, the Army Air Forces. The project was developed at Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica, California. Two years later, with Ford Foundation support, RAND became an independent, nonprofit research institution committed to exploring the most complex and consequential problems facing our society. The RAND name originated as a contraction of Research and Development.
Today RAND conducts research on more than 1,000 topics in a typical year. The RAND Organization think tank deals with such issues as national defense, education and training, health care, criminal and civil justice, labor and population, science and technology, community development, international relations, and regional studies. Many of the reports are available full text online for free.
Search Tips:
- Identify phrases with quotation marks, for example:
Diabetes and "childhood obesity"
Quotes label exact phrases; the above search would find only pages about childhood obesity, not children in general. - The NEAR operator finds terms that are close together, but not necessarily in the same phrase.
For example: Diabetes (childhood NEAR obesity)
Use the parentheses to make the search engine process that portion of your search together. - Like all Web search engines, the Rand search engine Vivisimo finds documents containing all of the words in your query and presents them in order of relevance. However, it also creates categorized clusters on-the-fly, customized for your search results and displayed in the left column. Browsing these clusters by clickin on them can help you quickly zoom in on groups of relevant documents.
Where is it: Go to the UNLV Libraries' home page http://www.library.unlv.edu. Select the Articles and Databases tab, click on the A-Z List of Databases and then on the letter R and select Rand Abstracts.
Quick Link: http://ezproxy.library.unlv.edu/login?url=http://www.rand.org/Abstracts/