The use of GIS (Geographic Information Systems) has exploded in the social sciences. The technology enables geographers, demographers, sociologists, and everyone else to crunch any data with a spatial component. The literature on GIS is also expanding. The following is a review of an extensive, and free, internet based GIS bibliography. Many thanks to CHOICE for permission to reproduce this review.
Reprinted with permission from CHOICE http://www.cro2.org, copyright by the American Library Association.
GIS Bibliography, from ESRI. Internet Resource. Reviewed in 2011may CHOICE.
http://training.esri.com/campus/library/index.cfm
[Visited Feb’11] This site is a free, openly accessible index to over 100,000 journal and magazine articles, books and book sections, conference presentations/publications, and theses related to geographic information systems (GIS) and GIS technology. It covers materials from the earliest uses of computers to analyze geographic information in the 1940s to the present. It is based on the GIS Master Bibliography Project, which was started in 1991 by Duane Marble while he was a professor at Ohio State University. Since 1999, ESRI Inc., a leading GIS technology company, has developed, maintained, and made available for free the GIS Bibliography. This resource is not as sophisticated as commercial databases. Search capabilities are limited. Basic searches can be done for terms in the full record, as phrases or title, and using the Boolean operators AND and NOT. Advanced search options include searching for one or more terms in all fields, title, author, keywords, or abstract; phrase searches; limiting by publication type; and identifying published articles or full-text publications. Users may also browse the GIS Bibliography for books on a particular topic or articles in a specific journal issue. Those with free ESRI global accounts can mark references to save in a personal bibliography or send them to their e-mail address in Refer format.
Other indexes contain citations to GIS literature, including Elsevier’s GEOBASE (some 57,000 items) http://www.ei.org/geobase and Compendex (some 49,000 items) http://www.ei.org/compendex (CH, Nov’05, 43-1299), and Inspec (some 42,000 items) http://www.theiet.org/publishing/inspec/. These indexes include articles from foreign-language journals that are not indexed in the GIS Bibliography. Though not comprehensive, the GIS Bibliography is an important source that should be used in community college and academic libraries supporting GIS programs. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower- and upper-level undergraduates, two-year technical program students, graduate students, researchers, and professionals. — L. R. Zellmer, Western Illinois University
All Things Research 