(Modified from GEOL 4717/5717)
Phil White's geology library resources: libguides.colorado.edu/geology
There are three basic means of researching a topic:
If you have a paper you've already found or been pointed at, you should be able to then look up that paper, read it, and note the references that describe things you want for your term paper. Of course you won't be able to find more recent papers this way; nor can you find papers that were not cited but might be relevant. For this you need the other two methods of library research. (A fourth trick, most useful in tracking down very recent research, is to look at recent publications of an author who presented an abstract of interest in the past few years; for this, often the best bet is to find the author's home page at their institution, but sometimes the author search will turn up some recent publications).
Keyword search is the most commonly attempted search by most researchers. You can start from scratch and hunt through the databases to find what you need. The downside is that it is frequently tricky to get keywords that yield the papers you really want. Searches often yield way too much or way too little. There are two main databases I will emphasize and a few with some quick overview. These two are only accessible from CU computers, by using the library proxy server or through VPN from offcampus (see http://www.colorado.edu/oit/services/network-internet-services/vpn for info on CU's VPN).
Databases now vary in treating your search as a phrase or a series of words connected by "AND". Entering "Rio Grande Rift faulting" could yield nothing because that exact phrase isn't in any papers; conversely in a system that allows all words to match, could end up with a large pile of unrelated papers. Instead you have to use boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT and, if necessary, place your desired phrases in quotation marks. So a better search is "'Rio Grande Rift' AND fault*". The other key element is the wildcard *. This matches any word starting with the letters before the *. So, for instance, geolog* will get geology and geologic and geological.
In terms of actually obtaining a paper, increasingly the digital object identifier (DOI) is available from indices. You can directly go to that document by entering the URL "http://dx.doi.org/DOI" where DOI is the doi value from the entry. Now for some journals, there are multiple places articles are archived, so if you encounter a paywall, you might look to see if the journal is also in geoscienceworld.org, or check for the journal name in the CU library Chinook site. (For instance, AAPG affiliated journals and books are available through a special portal at CU).
Georef's advantage is mainly the keywords that are attached to articles, which are more extensive than in other databases. Also Georef includes a number of publication types that do not make it into Science Citation Index like field trip guidebooks, book volumes, and meeting abstracts. This last is a mixed blessing as you might find a blizzard of abstracts on a topic, but there are places to make it relatively painless to separate abstracts out. Disadvantages include occasional lapses, especially of AGU journals (some issues of Tectonics used to be missing, for instance). The degree to which keywords are correctly applied can vary noticeably (basically, AGI hired students to apply the categories to each paper). The link above takes you to the advanced search page, which is more useful than the basic search page. Unfortunately, there have been multiple vendors over the years providing different front ends to the database and the different vendors sometimes seem to change the rules in odd ways. The current incarnation by ProQuest has, for instance, mangled the latitude and longitude data fields. Georef now is including links to papers citing a given entry.
The advanced search page has two main components: A place for you to enter search terms (and apply them to specific fields in the Georef database) and a place to limit the kinds of works that will be returned.
Keyword hints:
You can combine searches in many ways in Georef. For instance, if you were interested in finding out about the Mesozoic plutons in the Sierra Nevada, you could start with Sierra Nevada. This yields too many results (over 8000 by my count), so you might then do something like "Sierra Nevada AND Mesozoic". However if you look closely you will discover that you got some hits that just had both 'Sierra' and 'Nevada' in the title, but not Sierra Nevada--the search we just did is actually equivalent to "Sierra AND Nevada AND Mesozoic". To get what we really want, you have to enclose Sierra Nevada in quotes (this will remove a few of the spurious references). You can also combine searches from the recent searches pane (click on the "recent searches" link at page top); this seems to be working better than a few years ago.
Following authors can be a challenge in GeoRef, as GeoRef sometimes preserves multiple forms of an author's name without connecting them. The easiest way is if you find one paper by an author you want to follow, you can open the record for that paper (click on the title) and then the author's name is a hyperlink. The current incarnation is better about this than some in the past but is often unpredictable. The author search will not do a partial match unless you use a wild card like "*". So while you might think that "Wesnou" in author should get all authors whose name includes Wesnou (which is often what Google will do), you will get nothing. Adding the asterisk (*) will get over 200 hits in this case. Some author name searches will return results without any matches, which makes you think it likely there are other hits out there that are missed.
Keywords are always a challenge. In Georef, state and county are frequently present, while some more familiar placename (XYZ Peak) might not. Similarly, an orogeny name might not be put in as frequently as the time (Jurassic). If you aren't picking up what you want, try to use more general terms and then winnow down. State names and often county names are included accurately in the descriptor field (see below). What is nice in the current version of Georef is that the Subject list for a particular record gives you an idea of the keywords Georef will use--you can click on terms from one record that capture the aspect you are interested in and launch a new search from there. Also, on the initial search page, you can select which of the fields you might want to search in. Unfortunately, ProQuest (the current search engine) did not preserve some of the granularity in the older version of Georef, which on some occasions makes it harder to use the topics.
If you find a record that fits well, look at the full record and see what keywords or descriptors are there. It might help you find similar papers.
It is worth looking at the search tips (link is on many of the pages) to understand how some more complex queries can be constructed (e.g., using "near").
Limiting documents
There are several options right at the start that can affect what you will get. There is a box "Peer reviewed" and "Scholarly journals" that, well, aren't the most obvious in terms of effect. I would avoid these at the moment: for instance, the peer reviewed criterion apparently explicitly removes many papers in Geosphere (which were in fact peer reviewed) while allowing many meeting abstracts through (many of which I am confident were never peer reviewed). "Scholarly journals" will remove books and theses, which can both be useful (especially books) though harder to find, though it is worth noting that Georef has apparently expanded to include popular science books in its listings (for instance, the book Rough Hewn Land is included in the same category as a book from a symposium).
More useful is the second set of checkboxes on the initial search page--these move over to the right side in the results page. I personally would usually start by eliminating abstracts from the search by checking the "Select All" in the Document Type box and then unchecking "Abstract Only". (Later on you might want to look for some recent abstracts if you are really eager to try and be most up to date). Limiting language isn't usually a big issue. You can at the bottom of the initial search page choose whether you want results by relevance or date. (Not sure I'd trust relevance). (Unfortunately the abstract only checkbox seems not to work perfectly; you can add "NOT abstract only" as the final search term, which seems to work better).
On the results page, the document type area is where you can drop abstracts (Click on More Options after expanding the topic and then you can just exclude abstracts). Some of the other tools on the right side can help you narrow your search some. Once you are on the results page, if you want to edit the search in the box with the search listed, you will need to know the shorthand terms (au for author, ti for title, etc.) in order to adjust the keywords on the fly. The help system can get you straightened out (for instance, if you want papers since 2004, you would use py(>2004)). Note that although there are latitude and longitude fields in GeoRef, the current search engine cannot seem to use them sensibly.
For individual papers, you will see a "Cited by" link. This is usually far less comprehensive than that provided by Web of Science (below) but sometimes will point into theses and books not included in Web of Science.
SCI's Web of Science (WoS) is one of the biggest database out there, and its great strength is showing what newer papers cited a paper. This is a general science database and includes articles in many other disciplines, which can occasionally make a search quite unwieldy. The keywords are not as comprehensive as Georef (especially placenames) but the database can be more up to date. You might want to unclick the non-physical science databases on the intro screen.
Generally the best use of this database is to find a paper that is highly relevant and then to look at the citations. So, for instance, we want to know what work was done on the Lone Pine Fault and we knew of a paper by Lubetkin and Clark in 1988. So from the home page for Web of Science, you could enter "Lubetkin AND Clark" in the search field and then select "Author" from the pulldown menu. Click on the Add Row button to add a second search field and enter "1988" there and choose "Year published" and click Search. You will then see the paper on the Lone Pine Fault. At the right side is a link to "Times Cited:" with a number (50 at this writing). Click on the number to see what papers cite this one. The results are typically in reverse order by date (though you can change the order with the "Sort by" options above the list of papers). You can then scan for newer papers that look relevant and repeat the process.
Citation Search is a very powerful, often underutilized way of finding recent papers that address a topic of interest that is best exemplified by a paper not directly archived by Web of Science. It often occurs that you will be able to quickly identify a key paper on some feature, but it might be quite dated. Obviously the old references in it are not much of a help, but it is the perfect paper (had it only been published last year). In SCI you can find out who else cited the paper.
So if yuo can't find the paper as described above, then go to the home pagewindow of WoS, click on the "Cited Reference Search" button. This will let you search for things well before the start date of the online SCI or materials published in places SCI doesn't directly index.
Citation search is the only place you will be able to use non-journal literature in SCI. Things like GSA Special Papers and AGU monographs are not always indexed as primary records, but citations to those papers will appear in journal articles. If the first author's name is quite distinctive, you might do best by searching on that name and the year rather than trying to enter a journal name. (Adding the journal or book name usually is frustrating, so often you are better off skimming through a list of name-year pairs to find the ones you want). Once you locate these, click on the checkboxes for the entry or entries desired and click on "Finish Search" at the right.
Cited Ref hints: (SCI)
You can sometimes find referecnes to an old paper by first looking at a paper in the database that cites the old paper. Find the new paper (author and year, for instance) and then click on the full record for that paper. You can then uncheck all but the desired reference in the lefthand box and click on related records.
You can pyramid things this way too. You search for citations to a 1920 paper that is cited by a "perfect" 1950 paper you had found, which in turn leads to a more recent paper, etc.
Another trick is the "Related Records" button. When you find a paper in the database, you will find this button towards the right. It finds other papers that cite much of the same literature. A trick that used to be simple was to trim the list of references and then using the Relate Records button, but it appears this is now either disabled or much harder..
SCI also now has a tool to help follow a particular author through various combinations of initials ("Author Search" on the homepage). It is not perfect but can be a help in those instances where you want to find what a particular author has published.
Although the interface is familiar, the underlying database is more erratic in coverage. Google Scholar relies on publicly accessible databases, which in the earth sciences are kind of odd collections of things like physics and medical databases that happen to overlap onto journals. Because you are getting everything, you might have to sift through a lot more irrelevant information. The good thing here is that the net is wider: you might uncover something unusual. This is not the highest probability path to enlightenment at present. The very best thing about this is that it can turn up reprints of papers that are present on home pages of authors or scans of old books that Google has done.
CU has a subscription to this, so for the most part it works best if you are on a CU computer or otherwise connected as described above for Georef and WOS. Geoscienceworld is an initiative led by GSA to have online versions of journals available under one roof; it has a lot of journals but most notably is missing AGU journals.A full text search is possible within the Advanced search options; this has improved from older versions of the website, but the default simple search is pretty bad. The oddest feature is an ability to search for figures with specific text. Citations from journals that are also in GeoscienceWorld are found on the abstract page for an article, so you can go directly to desired texts. GSW does include abstracts from Georef as an option in searching, so on some rare occasions you might hit something here that might not show in Georef itself. There is a tool using the latitude/longitude info now lost in Georef: the advanced search does include a geographic search that can, in some instances, be helpful (though its interface is rather clunky).
Maintained by the U.S. Geological Survey, this can point you to geologic maps of an area you are interested in. Although most maps are freestanding, some have texts that accompany the maps that can be helpful. This does not include geologic maps within journals as a rule. The map interface is down (it was built with Flash and wasn't yet updated last I checked) but other interfaces are present. This can be helpful if you find some particular locality is important; many maps have text associated with them that are not indexed separately.
This site has been greatly upgraded in recent years, though it is harvesting information from other primary databases now. It seems to have a better keyword search than Web of Science and a cleaner link to cited literature as well as the actual paper. It does not though show you the papers citing a specific paper, merely the papers cited by a paper. It seems there is popular media materials in here too from time to time. Some of the information harvested is a bit flaky ("Fields of study" under an author list is often far off the mark). Overall this seems a weaker tool than Web of Science or Georef for our purposes; my searches have not turned up anything new using this site.
Engineering database that has some geophysics and hydrology not in Georef.
We now have access to the electronic versions of these materials as made available by GSA. The field guides page only includes the ones formally published by national GSA and don't include the ones published by local groups for most section meetings or national meetings prior to 1999. There is a search utility; I have not played with it enough to know how useful it really is. Many of these volumes have not been incorporated into Web of Science (though that too is changing), though they should be in Georef.
While you will find that many of the "Find it at CU" links work just fine, or using the DOI value on an article resolves to the proper link that you can download (note: if you have a DOI, then appending it to 'http://dx.doi.org/' will resolve the paper), you might discover that a number of AAPG publications (mainly AAPG Bulletin) are not available in the usual ways. We are fortunate to have access to a more complete database for these resources--link is above. This claims to have a full text search which might turn up something unusual. Certain topics might have material here that might be overlooked in the other databases, especially older material.
I have left this down here because Chinook is mainly a tool for finding materials we have at CU. This includes locating other electronic resources, but except for locating electronic resources (including the CU interface to Google Scholar) and books and local theses, this may not be where you start your searches from.
Wikipedia, like any encyclopedia, is not a primary source of information. The articles on geologic locales are often the result of one interested individual and so can have a decided bias. (For instance, the page on the Rio Grande Rift in 2007 was based nearly entirely on work done at New Mexico Tech). However, the articles are usually footnoted, and those can point you at useful parts of the professional literature.
Depending on the topic, the Friends of the Pleistocene field guides can get you fairly up to date or below the publication threshold material on geologic features from the past million or so years, so probably not a great resource for this class, but thought you might want to be aware of it. These are not searchable and are not peer-reviewed and are not archived as a rule, so this is what we call gray literature. They've posted pdfs of many of the field guides--you might have to dig about a bit, but depending on what you are looking for, can be worth the effort.
Sometimes you will find that our library doesn't have a book you might want. The Prospector link at the right side of a search on our library page will search other libraries along the front range. If the book is available from nearby, you can request it with your identikey to have it delivered. Materials that CU has but are offsite can be scanned; scanned materials usually arrive a day or two after the request is made. Theses are a special case. Usually you will have no need to see a thesis--either the material was published somewhere or it is too esoterically. While some theses are now online, many are not, and as there usually are only one or two copies of a thesis in a library, it can be hard to get a copy. There is a company that has scanned theses and will provide you a copy if you pay the big bucks; you almost certainly don't want to go there. If you find you really do want to see a thesis, you should go through interlibrary loan (unless it is a CU thesis, of course).
Please send mail to cjones@colorado.edu if you encounter any problems or have suggestions.
C. H. Jones | CIRES | Dept. of Geological Sciences | Univ. of Colorado at Boulder
Last modified at March 19, 2021 7:06 PM