The terms are based on the vocabulary used in the more than 110,000 books, articles, and reports in the NCJRS database, as well as on the frequency of term usage in the literature and on language of the user community. Two types of terms are listed: descriptors and synonyms or near synonyms. Scope notes are included to define or limit the specific use of many descriptors The appropriate broader terms, narrower terms, and related terms are also listed for each descriptor. The thesaurus contains 320 geographic terms, 236 geographic descriptors, 542 organizational terms, 366 organizational descriptors, 5,524 substantive terms, and 3,848 substantive descriptors. Permuted index