Graduate Research in Geography

Use these databases to find peer-reviewed research in geography and related fields. For tips & tricks on how to efficiently navigate academic databases, see the search tips page.

I want to expand my results; I'm not getting enough information.

• Add the OR operator between your keywords. This is helpful when one concept might be called by multiple different terms in the scholarship, such as how the Middle Ages have also been called the Dark Ages or the Medieval era. 
  • Example: agriculture OR farming. This asks the database to bring back any articles that contain EITHER the word agriculture OR the word farming. I don't want to miss out on a useful article because the author used the term agriculture, but I only used the word farming in my search!
• Use truncation. Truncation expands your keyword to include all variants of the word.
  • Example: politic* finds articles containing politics, political, politician, politicians. farm* finds articles containing farm, farmer, farmers, farming, farmland. 

I want to narrow my results; I'm getting too much information or I'm getting irrelevant information.

• Use phrase searching. Phrase searching finds articles where the exact phrase you search appears.
  • Example: "food security" brings back articles containing the phrase "food security" and ignores articles where the word "food" appears in one paragraph and the word "security" appears separately somewhere else. But be careful--the databases are searching for an exact match to the term you put in quotations, so in this case, the database would ignore articles only containing the phrase "food insecurity."  
• Add the AND operator between your keywords. This tells the database that BOTH of your keywords MUST appear somewhere in the article. Unlike with phrase searching, they do not need to be next to each other.
  • Example: agriculture AND biodiversity 

An impact factor is one of many tools we use to evaluate the quality of peer-reviewed journals. A journal's impact factor tells you the average number of times articles from this journal have been cited in the last two years.

An impact factor may help you measure the importance of a journal in your field, but it is not the only way to understand the quality of a journal. The impact factor doesn't tell you about the quality of the peer-review process, for example. The impact factor may also become skewed due to uneven citations across articles within a journal; one "blockbuster" article could artificially raise the impact factor for the entire journal.

Ultimately, the impact factor is one of many tools at your disposal for understanding a journal you are interested in citing or submitting to. See this page for more information about how to evaluate the quality of a journal.

Rank Physical Geography Journals by Impact

To generate a list of Physical Geography journals ranked by impact factor ...
1. Click on the "Categories" option in Journal Citation Reports.
2. Scroll down the page and click on the option "Geosciences."
3. Scroll down the list and click on the option Geography, Physical.
 

Rank General Geography Journals by Impact

To generate a list of general Geography journals ranked by impact factor ...
1. Click on the "Categories" option in Journal Citation Reports.
2. Scroll down the page and click on the option "Social Sciences, General."
3. Scroll down the list and click on the option Geography.