Non-profit scientific publisher IOP Publishing (IOP), UK, and USDA's Agricultural Research Service (ARS) have signed an agreement to add more than 1000 articles from IOP's journal Environmental Research Letters (ERL) to the JournalMap literature discovery database.
JournalMap's vision is to help scientists find out what research has been done in a specific location, as well as to determine whether a study undertaken in a specific region, could be relevant to another part of the world.
Geographical tags are applied to published journal articles so that the location(s) featured in the research are available and searchable via the JournalMap website. Once JournalMap users have found a relevant article, they can click on the article to read it on the publisher's website. As well as being able to filter research by different ecological or environmental aspects, or by author name, journal or keyword, users can create their own collection of articles.
The importance of being able to search by location or on attributes that can be derived from a study's location is most obvious for a journal such as ERL where the majority of its research articles are tied to locations on the globe. Adding ERL to the JournalMap database not only improves the ease and accessibility of relevant research findings but also promotes syntheses and meta-analyses, and provides greater understanding of processes that create environmental patterns.
