Welcome to Science GeoTag Home!
We are living in an unprecedented era of scientific exploration and discovery. Missions are exploring planets throughout the solar system and thousands of scientists are working each day to turn mountains of data into peer-reviewed publications. The downside of all this discovery is the challenge of finding the papers you want. Databases like Google Scholar and Web of Science do a great job of searching for papers based on keywords, dates, authors, and other attributes. While these searches are very useful, they can limit access to researchers who are new to a field and may not know which keywords to search. We bridge this challenge with this attempt to GeoTag Science.
Science GeoTag is my effort to map scientific papers to the locations to which the papers refer. This should allow researchers to move around a map of a planet and find the papers that have been published about a particular region. Sites like Journal Map have done this for papers about the Earth, and I am trying to take this to Mars. This is not yet a solved problem. There is no existing database of locations per paper, so this effort follows my attempts to create and plot this database to make the search easy for researchers. Please enjoy my attempts at GeoTagging the science of space and let me know if you have questions, comments, or suggestions.
The most robust way to get locations from papers is to have a trained eye read the papers and extract the information from the text and figures. This is by far the best way to ensure accuracy and completeness. However, it is very slow and time-intensive. Here I have begun this effort for my papers and those of close collaborators. I am happy to accept locations sent in by you and will build this up in time.
Currently Mapped Papers: 11, Locations: 81 Click Here for Manual Map
My second attempt to geotag Mars Science is centered on searching for locations mentioned in paper abstracts. First I got the list of named features on Mars from the IAU. This includes 1903 names including craters, mons, and albedo features plus more. Then I search for these names in abstracts from Adsabs. This method allowed me to quickly search 3000 abstracts about Mars to extract 5000 locations. This creates a large dataset that is great for browsing, but not one that is very robust. For example, the current version show papers that refer to the Mars region Vik if there is any mention of the Viking mission in the abstract. Similarly, the Hesperia region shows papers that mention the Hesperian Era. More robust search parameters should help with this. On the other side of the problem, there is no way to identify locations that have no IAU name or are not mentioned in the abstract.
Currently Searched Papers: 2993, Locations: 5079 Click Here for Abstract Search Map
Text Reading - In Development
The ultimate goal of this project is to develop a script that can go through a paper's text and return a complete list of locations for mapping. This effort is challenged by the sheer number of ways in which authors ref through locations in papers and the challenge in getting ready access to papers that are often behind a paywall. As this method develops, we will add more here.