Selected Readings

Guide to Literature Searches

Guide to Literature Searches
These resource listings were created from literature searches conducted on October 26th, 2005 by Tara Murray, from the Penn State PRI Information Core. The search engines EconLit, PsychINFO, PubMed, Social Science Citation Index, and Sociological Abstracts were used to collect citations with the keywords Geographic Information Systems, GIS, or Spatial Analysis. The results from these searches were then pared down by applicability. The results from Sociological Abstracts, EconLit and PsychINFO are from the years 1990-2005. Due to the quantity of applicable results, results from PubMed and SSCI are from the years 2001-2005.
The results from each search engine are contained within their own document, and organized bye their substantive topics. There are five main categories used to organize these citations:
( Health,   Environment,   Economics/Urban,   Social Science, and   Methods/Applications ).

The citations were further organized, within the five main categories, into sub categories that are listed in the accompanying matrix. The matrix shows the number of citations that were found through each search engine by main and sub category.
Please note the categorization of these records was at the discretion of Becki Curtis and Stephen Matthews, not by the authors themselves. Citations were placed into a single category (matrix cell), though many could have been placed into more than one or potentially many different categories (cells). For example, an article that deals with carpooling could have been placed into the pollution (air) category instead of the transportation or urban planning and community categories. Due to this decision, we suggest that you take into consideration the substantive overlap between many of the categories within this resource listing when searching for citations dealing with a particular topic.
If the citations within a sub category could be further sorted into groups with more than five citations, the grouping was made into a category of its own. For example, there were numerous citations within the disease sub category that could be grouped into their own type of disease, such as malaria and dengue fever, which were then made into categories of their own due to the large number of citations dealing with malaria or dengue fever.
To aid in the navigation and exporation of the larger sub categories, with fifteen or more citations, we have put together a listing of the substantive topics found within each of the larger sub categories within each search engine's resource list.