CIA Gives World Factbook a Makeover One of the new features of the Factbook is that many of the data fields now contain world rankings. So looking at Iceland’s life expectancy at birth, I can see that it’s 80.67 years for the total population, but I can also see it ranks 14th in the world. If I click on the 14 I can get the full ranking of all countries for this statistic (Macau ranks #1 in case you wondered.)

If you just want to get a list of a single data point for all countries, look for the “Field Listing” icon to the right of each data heading. This’ll give you all countries in alphabetical order. This is handy when you want to get an overview for unrankable information like natural resources or international disputes.

The CIA World Factbook updates every two weeks, which I keep having to remind myself is NOT slow in the age of Wikipedia. see complete article From Research Buzz at CIA Gives World Factbook a Makeover  ¶ 7/01/2009