Congressional Research Service reports are an authoritative source for information about policy issues before congress. The reports often become available to the public (with archives in several places, including https://opencrs.com/ and http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/index.html), as well as generally on the internet (try this google search: http://bit.ly/WF2JKC)
The reports are frequently issued with the same unique ID report number that follow a conventional format(something like RL2240), but different publication dates (which change as the report is updated). Sometimes the reports are updated a lot, other times a word may have been added or deleted, but no real change was made. Sometimes these changes are made for political reasons -- either to satisfy a constituency or to simply update the publication date.
What would be helpful is a way to see how "fresh" a CRS report is -- what percentage of it has changed, and what those changes were. This way, you don't need to reread a report if very little has changed, and you can monitor the change for all sorts of reasons.
Congressional Research Service reports are an authoritative source for information about policy issues before congress. The reports often become available to the public (with archives in several places, including https://opencrs.com/ and http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/index.html), as well as generally on the internet (try this google search: http://bit.ly/WF2JKC)
The reports are frequently issued with the same unique ID report number that follow a conventional format(something like RL2240), but different publication dates (which change as the report is updated). Sometimes the reports are updated a lot, other times a word may have been added or deleted, but no real change was made. Sometimes these changes are made for political reasons -- either to satisfy a constituency or to simply update the publication date.
What would be helpful is a way to see how "fresh" a CRS report is -- what percentage of it has changed, and what those changes were. This way, you don't need to reread a report if very little has changed, and you can monitor the change for all sorts of reasons.