Subject Guide
Welcome
This Guide will help you find quality information for your GIS project. Return to this Guide to find peer-reviewed scholarly articles, books, data sources, reliable websites, and more. Questions about finding, evaluating, or using your sources? Contact me - I can help!
Best Bets
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Web of Science This link opens in a new windowEnables users to search current and retrospective multidisciplinary information from thousands of the most prestigious, high impact research journals in the world. Web of Science also provides cited reference searching. With it, users can navigate forward, backward, and through the literature, searching all disciplines and time spans to uncover all the information relevant to their research.
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Annual Reviews This link opens in a new windowComprehensive critical reviews from leading scientists for focused disciplines within the Biomedical/Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Social Sciences.
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ScienceDirect This link opens in a new windowIncludes extensive full-text journal coverage of the physical and biological sciences, as well as some coverage of the social sciences and humanities.
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Natural Science Collection This link opens in a new windowThe Natural Science Collection of databases provides access to scholarly and other learned publications in agriculture, aquatic science, atmospheric science, biology, earth science, environmental science, and many other related subject areas.
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Social Sciences Abstracts This link opens in a new windowSU no longer subscribes to this resource. Due to overlap in content, we suggest searching the following resources instead: Academic Search Ultimate, JSTOR. Read more information about the 2025 library cancellation process.
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Oceanic Abstracts This link opens in a new windowWorldwide technical literature related to marine & brackish-water environments. Focuses on marine biology and physical oceanography, fisheries, aquaculture, non-living resources, meteorology and geology plus environmental, technological, and legislative topics.
Key GIS Journals
Below are some important GIS journals. Contact me if you need help finding more journals or specific articles. I can also help with questions about the difference between a journal and an article (and other library jargon), peer-review, open access, getting your work published, and selecting the information you need.
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ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote SensingISPRS stands for International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing.
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Journal of the Urban & Regional Information Systems AssociationAlso known as URISA Journal (Urban & Regional Information Systems Association).
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Surveying & Land Information ScienceFormerly known as Surveying & Land Information Systems.
SU Doesn't Have It?
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Interlibrary LoanNeed an article that we don't have at SU? Order it for free through Interlibrary Loan! Give yourself 2-4 days for articles and several weeks for books.
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Request Books from other USMAI SchoolsLogin with your GullNet credentials to access books from other University of Maryland schools! Books usually arrive in about a week, much faster than traditional ILL.
AI Research Tools
In addition to ChatGPT and other natural language processing models, there are many AI-supported tools to help you with research. If you find more tools, send me an email and I'll add them to this guide!
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PerplexityConversational search engine that cites articles and provides links within its response. Great for getting a quick summary on existing research.
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Research RabbitUnlock a completely novel way to search for papers and authors, monitor new literature, visualize research landscapes, and collaborate with colleagues.Great for people who like data visualization and want to see their citations connect.
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ElicitAutomate time-consuming research tasks like summarizing papers, extracting data, and synthesizing your findings.
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Semantic ScholarIndexes over 200 million academic papers sourced from publisher partnerships, data providers, and web crawls. This article search engine uses natural language processing and can help you find articles beyond the SU Libraries.