For interested readers who have other vocational plans, its authors-experienced researchers themselves-provide an intimate view of the way professional scholars go about their specialized and challenging tasks.

This extensively revised Fourth Edition takes full account of recent developments that have virtually revolutionized certain important areas of the discipline. The computer, as newly written pages demonstrate, not only has eliminated much of the drudgery formerly associated with the gathering, storage, and retrieval of raw data but has made possible many analytical and lexical...