GeoRef is an excellent resource to use when looking for Earth and Planetary Sciences resources. This tab describes the basics of how to use it in your research. Please look above for the tab on the ProQuest Natural Science Collection if you want information about doing interdisciplinary geosciences searches, especially those focused on air, climate, and geobiology.

GeoRef is the most comprehensive abstract database in the field, and it grows by at least 80,000 references a year (you publish a lot!). It contains journals, books, maps, and reports. The database also includes masters' and doctoral dissertations from US and Canadian universities.

We subscribe to GeoRef on the GeoScienceWorld platform.

GeoScienceWorld is a complex resources that contains many pieces. It contains:

• Ebooks and journals from many publishers in Earth Sciences, meaning that we receive full text through the GeoRef system for these things
• GeoRef, an abstract database, that links out to full text or gives us enough information to locate a print item
• OpenGeoSci, a free and public map-based toolset that allows users to search for cross sections, charts, tables, figures, and data from publications on the GeoScienceWorld platform

When you search for content on GeoScienceWorld, all of your searches will include GeoRef abstracts.

• If you only want to search GeoRef records, use the Advanced Search and limit to "GeoRef Record" using the check boxes at the top of the page.
• If you only want content accessible through GeoScienceWorld, choose the "Content I Have Access To" radio button.

GeoRef contains several very helpful search fields:

• Title and abstract — This prevents the database from searching the articles' full text, which keeps your results neat, tidy, and relevant.
• Coordinate bounds — If you are interested in a specific location, this will limit to papers mentioning locations within the bounding box you draw. As a word of caution, make sure that you click the search button at the bottom of the long string of journal titles, not the one after the additional GeoRef options. That one won't save any of your search's basic information.
• Meeting information — Suffering from conference/symposium/meeting haze, but remember the topic you heard presented on? Use this to narrow down to specific meeting locations or dates.
• Author + Author Affiliation — This helps you find works by a specific researcher.

Let's look at an example. I decided to search for research that contains the term paleomagnetism in the title and Africa in the abstract. The search gives me 218 GeoRef results.

Note 1: If I had kept all of the other options checked, like journal article and so on, I would have found 238 results.

Note 2: If you're using Boolean searching, the "Add Group" function will set up a way for you to AND/OR/NOT two separate groupings of terms. This is most useful for heavy-duty searching.

The result set includes many GeoRef records.

As shown in the image above, the YaleLinks button is located at the bottom of the individual item record. You can use CTRL (Windows/Linux) or ⌘ (Mac) + ↓ to quickly go to the bottom of the page.

If the Yale Links button doesn't show, it means that there may not be an online version; sometimes, however, things that are online somewhere (digitized or otherwise) may not show the button. There is still a way to seamlessly get to where you need to go. First, click on the article title to get to the record page. Now, you have three options.

(1) Click on the DOI in the individual GeoRef record, if there is a DOI.

(2) Use the DOI and the YUL citation lookup tool to find the information, which is available on the Journals A-Z page.

(3) Because older articles (like this one from 1961) may not have DOIs, you can use the YUL citation lookup form to find these. Since we likely have these in print and not online, depending on how far back our online access goes, you can also search the catalog for the journal title and request a scan of the article.

This should get you started with using GeoRef. Good luck!