A librarian wrote to the POPLINE database providers to ask why a search strategy, probably involving the word abortion, retrieved fewer results than it did 3 months earlier. The response was:
Yes we did make a change in POPLINE. We recently made all abortion terms stop words. As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now.
You can contact POPLINE here. You could ask that they make an announcement of this change on their website and provide a clear explanation as to why this term was eliminated.
POPLINE, is a database on reproductive health, population, family planning, and related health issues. It’s maintained by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health/Center for Communication Programs and funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
UPDATE: Women’s Health News has a great post on the topic, identifying work-arounds for the problem (for example, browsing the subject index instead of doing a search will retrieve articles on abortion).
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