Geography 315: Explanation & Understanding in Geography
Library & Information Resources

Geography Librarian: Amanda Hornby
email: hornbya@u.washington.edu

Using A Topic to Generate Questions
For everyone who has ever wondered, "What is a Research Question?" and "How do I get one?"

BACKGROUND RESEARCH: What is already known about your topic? / How has it been studied? / Who has studied this topic?

Progress in Human Geography UW restricted 1997-present. State-of-the-art Geography journal covering all of human geography’s major research and teaching fields. The journal regularly publishes literature review articles called Progress Reports - conduct a search that includes the words literature review to find these reviews.

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences UW restricted. Describes research and innovations in all the fields encompassed within the social and behavioral sciences.

Oxford Reference Online: Politics & Social Sciences UW restricted. Can't remember what neoliberalism means? Search several dictionaries, including A Dictionary of Geography for discipline-specific uses of terminology and concepts. A great source for identifying synonyms and more specific terms to use in your database searching.

Encyclopedia of Human Geography UW restricted - Get an overview of your topic as it has been discussed by geographers along with references to key literature.

Encyclopedia of GIS UW restricted

FINDING SCHOLARLY JOURNAL ARTICLES

Use these databases to find scholarly and trade articles that address all Geography concentrations.

Distinguishing Scholarly from Popular & Trade Publications
Before you start - questions to ask yourself and examples.

GeoBASE UW restricted
Covers journals in human and physical geography, environmental studies, and international development. Articles in scholarly journals ONLY.
Expanded Academic ASAP UW restricted
Academic Search Complete (EBSCO) UW restricted
Both databases include articles from both popular and scholarly publications - so you will need to chose carefully OR click the tab to limit your search to refereed publications or scholarly journals. These databases also cover many different disciplines in the social sciences, sciences, technology, business, and humanities, so can be a good starting place for many topics.
Web of Science UW restricted
Search by author, topic, and cited author. The cited author search and "times cited" feature allows you to begin unwinding the web of relationships among authors and ideas.

Additional Databases for Geography Concentrations:

Economic Geography

EconLIT UW restricted
Access journal articles, books, and dissertaions on economics published since 1969.
CAB Abstracts UW restricted
Provides access to citations and abstracts of the international agricultural literature, including plant protection, forestry engineering, animal husbandry, animal and plant breeding, genetics, veterinary medicine, nutrition, rural development, economics, and leisure and tourism. CAB Abstracts indexes articles, books, conferences, reports and other kinds of literature

Development Studies

Anthropology Plus UW restricted
Index to articles and essays on anthropology and archaeology, including art history, demography, economics, psychology, and religious studies.
PAIS International UW restricted
Covers journals along with selected books and government publication of the UN and US federal agencies on the topics of public affairs and international relations.

Feminist Geography

Left Index UW restricted
Diverse literature of the left, with an emphasis on political, economic, social, and culturally engaged scholarship. Topics covered include but are not limited to: the labor movement, ecology & environment, race & ethnicity, social & cultural theory, sociology, art & aesthetics, philosophy, history, education, law, and globalization.

Health / Medical Geography

CINAHL UW restricted
Coverage of the literature in nursing and 17 allied health disciplines from 1982-. Over 700 journals are regularly indexed.
POPLINE UW restricted
Reproductive health database; provides citations with abstracts of the worldwide literature in the field of population, family planning, and related health issues.
PubMED
Produced by the National Library of Medicine, PubMED includes over 16 million citations to journal articles published 1950 to present in the life sciences with a concentration on biomedicine.

Society and Environment

Agricola UW restricted
Contains bibliographic records primarily of journal articles and book chapters acquired by the National Agricultural Library in agriculture and environmental sciences.
GreenFILE UW restricted
Access scholarly & popular articles and government reports from the disciplines of agriculture, education, law, health and technology about the positive and negative impacts humans have on the environment.

Urban / Social / Political Geography

Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals UW restricted
Indexes more than 1,000 periodicals published worldwide on archaeology, urban planning, interior design, and historic preservation, as well as architecture; covers 1934 to the present

Area Studies Databases -- These databases may cover journal articles in a variety of subject areas - politics, sociology, international relations, literature - all united by their relevance to a broad geographic region.

Bibliography of Africana Periodical Literature Database. UW restricted
Index to over 200 English language journals that specialize in African studies. A related database is the African Women's Bibliographic Database UW restricted
Bibliography of Asian Studies UW restricted
Access to western-language articles and book chapters on all parts of Asia published since 1971.
HAPI Online (Hispanic American Periodicals Index) UW restricted
Index to articles in magazines and journals produced in and about Central & South America.
PRISMA (Publicaciones y Revistas Sociales y Humanisticas) UW restricted
Provides full-text scholarly journals in the social sciences and humanities for the interdisciplinary academic study of Hispanic and Latin America, and the Caribbean Basin. PRISMA features Spanish, Portuguese and English language content.
Handbook of Latin American Studies UW restricted
Edited by the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress, the multidisciplinary Handbook alternates annually between the social sciences and the humanities. Each year, more than 130 academics from around the world choose over 5,000 works for inclusion in the Handbook. Continuously published since 1936, the Handbook offers Latin Americanists an essential guide to available resources.
Index Islamicus UW restricted
A bibliography of books and index of articles in periodicals on Islam and the Muslim world.

FINDING BOOKS

UW Libraries Catalog
Search for books, journals (but not the articles in them), videos, music, etc. that are owned by the UW or, in the case of web resources, reviewed by UW Librarians for quality.

STATISTICS SOURCES: Important for some topics

FedStats
The gateway to statistics from over 100 U.S. Federal agencies on health, crime and justice, economy, business, agriculture, environment, energy, population, and much more.
Statistical Data from IGOs
Selected starting points for finding data from the World Bank, OECD, United Nations, International Labor Organization, and many more.
Statistical Universe UW restricted
Index to statistical content of publications produced by US federal agencies, international intergovernmental organizations (e.g. the UN, World Bank, IMF, etc.), US state government agencies, and private trade and research organizations.

LITERATURE REVIEW PROCESS

"One of the main reasons for writing the review is to make a proposal for the research you intend to do. This means that your review of the literature must provide a methodological rationalization for your research. You need, then, to demonstrate that you understand the history of your topic. The history is the assumptions and definitions other researchers have employed to study the topic. It is your responsibility to investigate this history in order to provide the story of how the topic was defined, established and developed."
Hart, Chris. 1998. Doing a literature review: releasing the social science research imagination. London : Sage. page 173.

CITATION STYLE & REFWORKS GUIDES

Citation & Writing Guides
Since you'll be graded on the clarity of your writing and the completeness of your citations you may find one or more of the resources here helpful.
RefWorks
Manage citations and format them to any style with a click of the mouse from any computer on or off campus. Tips for moving citations from geography databases into RefWorks.

Need Help? Ask Amanda or any librarian for assistance!

Amanda Hornby
Geography Librarian
Email: hornbya@u.washington.edu
Phone: (206) 685-1901
IM: uwhornbya (Yahoo)

Last modified by ah: Wednesday October 13, 2010