Geology 4717/5717 Research Resources

Phil White's geology library resources: libguides.colorado.edu/geology

Databases of information, including of published literature, that the library has access to are listed here.

There are three basic means of researching a topic:

  1. locate relevant references from the reference list of a relevant publication
  2. determine keywords that adequately describe your topic and then search in a database for matches to that set of keywords
  3. search for recent papers that cite an older, highly relevant article on the subject

There is a starting list of references handed out in class. Some references will be relevant to your topics; this will give you a jump on (1) as you should be able to then look up these papers, read them, and note the references that describe things you would like to present in the field. 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 https://oit.colorado.edu/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 (many times the DOI is already a link). 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: (ProQuest interface)

Technically Georef is a database with multiple gateways into it; we have access to the ProQuest one, and when I say "Georef" as a search tool, it is this interface I am talking about. 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. Don't count on author searches getting you very far in Georef.

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). 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. At the right side of the page for an individual record, there is a list of the subject terms that apply to that reference. One or more of those might prove enlightening; you can check the one(s) you want and then press the Search button within that "Search with Indecing terms" box.

You often can get the paper you've found from the individual page for that reference; there is often a "CU Full Text" or "Get full text" button under the Full text options tab on the right side. There are times it will fail

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 a source type "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).

You can limit by publication year either on the command line (YR(<2004) for instance to find papers from before 2004) or by using the "Enter a date range" command on the left side of the search results window.

You probably want to avoid abstracts from meetings in your initial searches; this doesn't work well from the Document Type choices. To get rid of abstracts you would add a "NOT (DTYPE(Abstract))" to the end of your search on the single search line or on its own line in the advanced search widnow. (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 left of the initial search page choose whether you want results by relevance or date. (Not sure I'd trust relevance).

Science Citation Index (aka SCI, Web of Science or WoS): https://www.webofscience.com/wos

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. If you come in from a more general entry point where you can choose your databases, you might want to unclick the non-physical science databases on the intro screen. One of the knocks against WoS is that it is rather picky about what is included. For us, this is often a feature: you are less apt to stumble into some strange literature through WoS than, say, Google. But there is quite a bit of literature outside of WoS that can be helpful (e.g., field guides, theses, some memoirs, maps).

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 (52 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.

On that main search result page there is a link "Related Records", usually in small type somewhere. This is a nifty trick for looking sideways in the literature. Basically, it looks for papers citing the same galaxy of papers as the one you are looking at. Odds are that later papers will cite a number of different papers for similar information, while older papers will not have seen some of the papers this paper cites. So it is mainly papers written about the same subject at nearly the same time that will often show up here. This can help uncover a line of research that maybe was left uncited but maybe has useful insights.

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. This is pretty obvious for papers in the journals WoS indexes, but sometimes there are papers that are not indexed.

So if you 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 have often not been indexed as primary records (this is changing for many of these),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. Sometimes this is helpful even for a paper that WoS does index because it is surprisingly common that papers have errors in their citation--the vollume number will be wrong, or the page number off.

Cited Ref hints: (WoS)

You can sometimes find references 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. (This circumvents entering the old paper info in the citation search, above).

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.

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.

Google Scholar http://scholar.google.com/

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, but it does seem to be improving. 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. There are also grey literature publications that Google might locate that will be excluded from Web of Science.

The Google Scholar tool has been refined quite a bit. Now the papers it shows are accompanied by links to papers citing this paper (according to Google), possible related papers, and to the Web of Science page for that article (with the number of citations according to WoS).

A 2023 Nature article considers some strategies for searching that are more Google-oriented.

GeoscienceWorld http://www.geoscienceworld.org/

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, many quite helpful for us, but most notably is missing AGU journals.A full text search is possible within the Advanced search options (and actually the default search appears ot be "All", which includes full text). This can be a life saver for more obscure topics that might get a mention withint papers on other things; having a sense of how to use wildcards can be a real help here. 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 (click on the Georef menu at the top of the page): the advanced search does include a geographic search that can, in some instances, be helpful.

Part of Geoscience World is OpenGeoSci (in the toolbar at the top), which is actually a map-based tool to locate figures. This is super clunky at present, but you can zoom in and then enter a more generic search term after clicking the "Limit search to map bounds" button to maybe find something appropriate for your topic. Or not: the underlying geographic database has issues. You can also enter this by clicking on the "Show on map" option from a search result in the main text field; clicking on the colored dots will zoom in; hovering over the blue location markers will reveal the extent of a study and its title (but not, at least in Safari, a link to the paper). You should probably read the existing instructions before trying this as getting things in the wrong order can be frustrating.

National Geologic Map database

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.

Engineering Village

Engineering database that has some geophysics and hydrology not in Georef.

GSA Special Papers/Memoirs/Field Guides

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 window that is basically the GeoScienceWorld search engine, but with an option to limit the search to (in this case) GSA publications. Many of these volumes have not been incorporated into Web of Science (though that too is changing), though they should be in Georef.

AAPG datapages includes AAPG Bulletin, Special Volumes, SEPM, J Petrol. Geol.

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 and certain areas might have material here that might be overlooked in the other databases, especially older material.

Chinook

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. OneSearch, the default tool the library provides for finding articles, is generally worthless for our purposes. But like all odd engines, it occasionally will cough up something worthwhile...

Wikipedia

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.

Friends of the Pleistocene field guides

Depending on the topic, the Friends of the Pleistocene field guides can get you fairly up to date on below the publication threshold material on geologic features from the past million or so years. 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.

EarthArXiv

You might be aware of the argument for fully open publication: write a paper and then just post it and let the world decide! EarthArXiv is building off of the wildly successful physics preprint server, ArXiv. This has not really taken hold in earth science (at least not solid earth). Another flavor promoted initially byu the Americal Geophysical Union is essopenarchive.org. In both of these the search tools are weak and much of this might not be peer-reviewed, so treat with care.

Getting materials

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 esoteric. 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). In some instances, the library will pay fees for getting some material that we don't have; you can always ask.


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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 April 16, 2023 3:51 PM