CIA World Fact Book reviewed by Péter Jacsó -[f the University of Hawaii, for Gale (March 2008)
It's really an issue of geographic literacy, which is sorely lacking.
"Geographic literacy and information has many layers, ranging from physical geography to human geography, to economic and political geography. In the open access arena, the CIA Word Factbook has a good position, only the country profile database of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the ones of the Foreign Affairs and International Trade Office of Canada are similarly comprehensive, and current."
This is the CIA - I would be suspicious of there being some bias. However Peter Jacso, who is thorough and accomplished in doing this kind of evaluation, finds that the CIA World Fact Book is, on the whole, a "good ready reference source".
"The CIA World Factbook is not the alpha and the omega for country information (and misses a few essential health indicators), but it keeps improving and being enhanced with new data elements, if not by new concepts, such as creating pre-defined subset groups for countries with certain common features, such as ASEAN countries, Francophone countries, orsub-Saharan countries. It is a good ready reference resource and could be quickly enhanced by links to data elements used in databases created by UN agencies and other non-profit international organizations which have unique and useful data, such as the human development index of UNDP. Links to other databases for corroborating values provided by the CIA also would be welcome."
Posted by Gwen at March 11, 2008 09:19 PM