About Subjects (CRS Index Terms)

Legislative analysts from the Congressional Research Service (CRS) of the Library of Congress closely examine the content of each bill and resolution and assign (index) as many subject terms as are required to describe the measure's substance and effects. Terms appearing in the Subjects display come from a list that is based upon the CRS Legislative Indexing Vocabulary (LIV), a thesaurus developed to classify public policy subject matter. The source also includes a large number of terms corresponding to geographic areas (foreign and domestic), U.S. Government entities, and congressional committees.

Clicking on Subjects in the full display will yield an alphabetical list of all Subject Terms assigned to the measure. Indexing is cumulative; that is, it is added to in order to reflect revisions (if any) made to the measure as it moves through the legislative process. (It is not currently possible to locate which of multiple bill versions has triggered the assignment of a term. Once you know that a particular subject is discussed, you should examine the measure's full text using the Web browser's "find" command.) The subject term list can be a mix of the very broad and the very narrow, depending upon what is called for by the measure's language and effects. Clicking on any given subject term will bring back a list of all measures to which that term has been assigned.

The list of subject terms for all bills and resolutions will include at least one of the 80 CRS Top Terms, which were designed to cluster documents into broad subject areas of public policy concern. For example, assignment of “Elementary school students” will require the inclusion of the Top Term “Elementary and secondary education.” Otherwise, these lists make no particular analytical statement and are not intended to abstract the measure or "string" subjects together in any way. However, the "umbrella" term at the head of the list (not alphabetized) is a Top Term that best describes the entirety of the measure's text.