Pick up your smartphone and ask it where the nearest place is to buy a cup of coffee. You will be presented with a map showing all of the nearby coffee shops with an arrow guiding your path. It’s amazing and getting better every day. This use of geographically specific information is now so commonplace that we take it for granted. Yet, not all information is so easily searched geographically – particularly the search for published research.
Most ecological research occurs somewhere. The geographical context of a study area such as climate, land cover, topography, and adjacency to human development is often essential to understanding the process being studied. So why aren’t we explicitly using maps and geographical context to find research that is relevant to our projects? Enter JournalMap (http://www.journalmap.org), a map-based scientific literature database and search engine. JournalMap uses study area descriptions from an article (not author affiliations) to map where the research was actually conducted. All articles in JournalMap are geotagged, either automatically using pattern recognition algorithms looking for geographic coordinates or manually from text-based descriptions. Test drive it, add some of your own articles, create a collection, and let us know what you think. As a demonstration we geotagged the entire archive of Ecosphere. http://journalmap.org/search?filters[collection_id][]=17 We have partnered with publishers (e.g., Taylor and Francis, Pensoft, IOP) and scientific societies to refine and scale this idea, but we also need your help! To fully realize the potential of this tool we need to know where you conducted your important research. Anyone can add geotagged articles to our database and it only takes a minute or two. Adding your content will put your research on the map making it discoverable by other scientists. http://journalmap.org/accounts/login The article location data we collect with JournalMap are freely available for non-commercial purposes (Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license). We show you where studies occurred but do not distribute published articles themselves. If you would like access to JournalMap’s database for research, please let us know. We believe the time is right for the idea of geographic-based literature discovery to take hold. Other complementary efforts like GLOBE (http://globe.umbc.edu) and GeoScience World (http://www.geoscienceworld.org/) show that momentum is building in the scientific community. JournalMap will be at the ESA conference in Sacramento to promote map-based literature searching and geographic standards for location reporting in ESA journals. Come by and have a chat! (PS 11, August 11, 4:30-6:30, Poster Board 92, #47675) Jason Karl Ph.D ([email protected]) Jeff Gillan ([email protected])
