Content last reviewed:
This guide is designed for graduate students in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies.
Thesis & Dissertation Writing Guides:
- How to do your dissertation in geography and related disciplines
- Research literacies and writing pedagogies for masters and doctoral writers
- Research methods for successful PhD
- The SAGE handbook of digital dissertations and theses
- Writing your doctoral dissertation or thesis: a proven map to success
Other Geography research and proposal writing guides:
- Communicating in geography and environmental sciences
- Research Design and Proposal Writing in Spatial Science
Theses Databases:
Grey Literature
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Grey Literature subject guide - what it is, how to search for it
Citation Management Tools
A citation manager will help to organize your citations as you research and write and thereby save you time. Tools such as Zotero, Mendeley and EndNote will help you prepare your bibliography in any bibliographic style by keeping track of all your sources in one place. Other features of these tools include the tagging of each document, annotating and saving PDFs.
Begin with:
Omni to find books, journal articles, newspaper articles, videos, and many other types of published literature. Omni searches almost all of our collections and databases, simultaneously. Learn to use the Advanced Search option for more targeted results.
- Find books
- Find journal articles
- For more information, consult the Omni Search Tips help guide
- Note: If you are searching from off campus, you must login if you want to be able to access the full text of journal articles and electronic resources.
Databases:
Begin with GEOBASE. It is the premier database for the all of the geosciences, including all aspects of human and physical geography.
Search subject-specific databases to find journal articles. They offer many advanced search features, only contain scholarly literature and search results are more precise. Consult the following recommended lists:
Interlibrary Loans:
Cited Reference Searching is most often used for finding articles that cite a particular work. Many databases provide citation counts for individual articles.
Why is this important?
- Keeping track of who has cited a given work can help you gauge the impact that article has in the discipline
- To find citation counts for geography, use Web of Science, or Scopus
- If the article has been cited, the database will provide a link to the citing articles
- Cited Reference Searching Help Guide
Literature Reviews are used to evaluate existing research related to your topic and to help position your argument on that topic within existing research.
- Conducting a Literature Review web guide
- How to write a literature review video
Research Data
Consult the Research data management guide for help with storing and preserving data in accordance with the Tri-Agency Principles of Data Management.
Qualitative Analysis
Consult the NVivo web page for help with using this software. It helps with the qualitative analysis of your project by coding your data and creating reports.
Databases
Sage Research Methods database is designed to support researchers with writing a research question, choosing a method, gathering and analyzing data, to and writing up & publishing the findings.
Books & Encyclopedias
- Conducting Research in Human Geography: theory, methodology and practice
- Elementary Statistics for Geographers
- Geographic thought: a critical introduction
- Geographic thought: a praxis perspective
- International Encyclopedia of human geography
- Methods in human geography: guide for students doing a research project
- Research methods in geography: a critical introduction
- The SAGE Handbook of qualitative geography
- The SAGE Handbook of spatial analysis
Statistics and Data
Publishing Guides
- Publishing Graduate Student Research in Geography: The Fundamentals
- Ulrichsweb - provides detailed information on more than 300,000 periodicals of all types and is often used to identify where to publish your work
Writing Guides
- Writing for Publication web guide
- Plain Language Writing (Youtube video)
- Writing Services @ Carleton University
Scholarly Communications and Open Access
- Scholarly Communications web guide
Funding
- Research Professional - a database of funding opportunities covering all disciplines.
Self Archiving
SHERPA/RoMEO - standard tool for researchers to easily navigate academic publishers' copyright and self-archiving policies when depositing scholarly articles in an institutional repository.
CURVE is Carleton's institutional repository which collects, preserves and provides open access to the academic research output and creative works of Carleton faculty and scholars.
ORCID
- What is an ORCID and do I need one?
- In brief, an ORCID is a digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, and automated links between you and your professional activities.
Journal Rankings and Metrics
Journal rankings and/or metrics is used to measure the ranking impact of a journal as a whole. They can also be used for:
- preparing your portfolio
- assessing the impact and quality of a journal relative to a particular discipline or field through ranking
- tenure and promotion in academia
- publication venue choices
- collection building and assessment
- Measuring Your Research Impact
Copyright
Thesis Guidelines @ Carleton University
