Human geography

Human geography is the branch of the social sciences that deals with the world, its people and their communities, cultures, economies and interaction with the environment by emphasizing their relations with and across space and place. As an intellectual discipline, geography is divided into the sub-fields of physical geography and human geography, the latter concentrating upon the study of human activities, by the application of qualitative and quantitative research methods.

History

Geography was not recognised as a formal academic discipline until the 18th century, although many scholars had undertaken geographical scholarship for much longer, particularly through cartography.

The Royal Geographical Society was founded in England in 1830, although the United Kingdom did not get its first full Chair of geography until 1917. The first real geographical intellect to emerge in United Kingdom geography was Halford John Mackinder, appointed reader at Oxford University in 1887.

The National Geographic Society was founded in the USA in 1888 and began publication of the National Geographic magazine which became and continues to be a great populariser of geographic information. The society has long supported geographic research and education.

GEOBASE

GEOBASE is a database, multidisciplinary in scope, which indexes bibliographic information and abstracts for the Geographical, Earth, and Ecological sciences, published by Engineering Information, a subsidiary of Elsevier. The broad subject coverage includes earth sciences, ecology, geomechanics, human geography, physical geography, social geography and oceanography. Development studies are also included in this database.

Coverage

Coverage includes 2000 peer reviewed journal, and trade journal titles. Other journal titles and books are included in the archival coverage of this database. With more than 2 million records, it has temporal coverage from 1980 to the present. Each year, at least 100,000 additional citations and abstracts are added, and it is updated every two weeks. Access is covered through both online (internet), and CD-ROM.

Other types of publications indexed in this database are magazine articles, product reviews, directories and all related materials. International literature coverage pertains to Non-English language papers, and lesser available books, conference proceedings and reports.