Overview of Library Resources for the Geosciences

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To get to the library’s website from the University’s home page go to Academics, then Libraries.

This is the library’s home page. You can search for various types of materials of materials using the tabs in the gray area, but what I want to show you right now is our research guides, which we call LibGuides. LibGuides pull together all the best resources for a particular topic or class in one place, so you don’t have to hunt them down separately. We have an icon for them next to the Facebook icon, it’s the yellow one that looks like an exploding book.

This is the LibGuides home page. The guides are categorized by subject. Scroll down to Geosciences, then Geology.

Here is the home page for the geology libguide. Use the tabs at the top of the page to navigate through the guide. To find the best sources for articles on geology, come to this guide and click the “Find Articles” tab.

We have several databases here, listed in order of probable usefulness. GeoRef is listed first because it’s the foremost geology database. Web of Science also has geology content and can also be useful to you, but it also covers many other subjects in addition to geology. GeoRef is just geology. As you can see, we have both GeoRef and GeoScienceWorld listed here, and we’ll talk about the differences between them shortly.

GeoRef has no full text natively, but will link out to FT where we may have it from another source, such as directly from the publisher. One of those sources might be GSW, but there are several other possible sources such as SD, Springer, or Wiley. GSW provides full text access to a subset of the geology journals indexed in GeoRef. That’s its primary role – providing FT. It also does give you the option to search a different version of GeoRef, but it’s a non-intuitive interface and you’ll only get full text for journals on GSW – it currently does NOT link to full text where we have it from other sources such as ScienceDirect.

You can choose which field to search using the drop-downs on the right. The system defaults to search all fields but not the FT of the documents (there is no FT in this database anyway). This means it will search the title, author, abstract, subject, etc. We will run a search that includes 2 different concepts – karst hydrology or hydrogeology in Arkansas. The first concept is the geologic concept of karst hydrogeology or hydrology and the 2nd is this geographic area. We’ll enter our first concept on the first line and search for it in the subject. Use the asterisk (*) to truncate the “hydro” word stem – doing this will bring back anything that begins with that word stem, such as hydrology or hydrogeology. We’ll add our second concept to a new line. There could be different terms to describe it, so we’ll ask for either “arkansas” or “ozark*” and search for it anywhere in the record.

This is what your results list looks like. You can refine your results using the options in the panel on the right, including the date slider at the bottom, subjects (assigned by ProQuest, the database aggregator), or classification (broad geology topics assigned by GeoRef).

Look at the subjects assigned to this article to find other search terms. You can also click on a term to run a new search for articles with that term assigned to them.

Use the “Find it!” pig button to determine if we have the full text of this article.

If we didn’t have the journal electronically, the “Find Full Text” section wouldn’t appear on this page – it would skip to “Library Catalog”. Let’s pretend that’s the case and click the link to check the library catalog for a print version.

If something’s available electronically it will show up in a gray box. If not, no gray box will appear. We’ll pretend we don’t have it and ignore it and look below at the print holdings. 2002 isn’t in our date range. So we don’t have it either online or in print. In this case, you would submit an ILL request. But before we do that, we’ll try out our new map it feature…

Click the Map it! button to see an item’s location in the library.

If you determine that we don’t have the article you need either electronically or in print, proceed to the next section on the Find it! page to request an interlibrary loan.

ILLIAD is the name of the interlibrary loan system. You must create an account, separate from your main library account. Use the link in the yellow section at the top of the page to create a new account if needed.

Because we are submitting our request through the Find it! page after searching for an article, the system knows and pre-populates the information for the article of interest in the form. Just hit the submit button! You will be notified by email when the article is available, which is usually within 48 hours and often faster.

We also have several databases covering topics in human geography, which are included in the LibGuide. Next we’ll look at SSCI/Web of Sci.

This is what the home page looks like. Web of Knowledge is the name of the platform or interface. Web of Science is one of the databases you can search on this platform. There are several databases you can search on this platform, and you can choose them individually through the “Select a Database” tab, but for now we’ll search across everything at once via the home page.

You can change the sort to sort your results by times cited to find the most important articles on a topic. You can also link to articles that cited that one and so on to trace the history of research on a topic.

The first article has been cited 99 times. Keep in mind that if something has never been cited, it might just be too recent for new articles to have cited it. But this one’s fairly recent and it’s already been cited 99 times, so it’s probably important.

You can show or hide the abstract or summary to see if it’s something you’re interested in. Click on the number next to “Times Cited” to link to the citing articles.

Select citations of interest and export to a citation manager, in this case RefWorks.

Your last import will automatically go into the “Last Imported” folder. If you import more before moving those first citations to another folder, they’ll be bumped out and it will look like they’ve been overwritten. They have not; go to the “Not in Folders” folder in the right-hand panel to find them.

You must review/edit the citations! RefWorks and the metadata that’s entered isn’t perfect.

Download these extensions through the tools menu in your online RefWorks account.

Depending on your browser and the choices you made when you downloaded the tool, the bookmarklet could appear at the bottom right of your screen, or in your bookmarks bar at the top. Click on it to automatically scrape the citation info from the page you’re looking at and dump it into RefWorks.

Again, download the Write-N-Cite plug-in for Word using the tools menu in your online RefWorks account.

A dialog box will pop up that has all of your RefWorks citations stored in it. Choose a reference and click OK to insert the in-text citation.

Let’s say you’ve finished writing your paper, which has ten in-text citations. Go to Bibliography Options – Insert Bibliography, and it will auto-generate your references for you!

If you had ten in-text citations, there would be ten references here, all listed in the correct order.

See the Maps, GIS and Remote Sensing LibGuide for more information and links to resources. The Print Map Collection section provides a visual overview of the maps section of the library.

All the maps are color-coded. Geologic maps are pink and topographic maps are in various shades of green.

The LibGuide has information on learning GIS.

It also provides links to spatial data sources.

RazorRush is a new service where, if we have a journal in print but not online, we’ll scan it for you and send it by email. Use the ILL form we saw before to place a request.

Overview of Library Resources for the Geosciences

Kate Dougherty

Overview of Library Resources for the Geosciences