GEOG 620

Journal Assignment

The purpose of this assignment is to familiarize you with the scope and content of basic geographical journals in English.  Each of you should spend a few hours in the library familiarizing yourself with the following general geographical journals:  Annals of the Association of American Geographers, The Professional Geographer, Physical Geography, Geographical Review, Progress in Human Geography, Progress in Physical Geography, and Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.  Come to class prepared to discuss the scope, content, and style of these journals.  In addition, each of you will be assigned one of the subfields of geography listed below.  Your job is to prepare a short written review of three or four journals that are likely to be of use to individuals doing research in that subfield (we have listed one or two journal suggestions to get you started). You need not limit yourself to geographical journals, but the geographical journal(s) listed after the subfield should be among the three or four you choose to review. Each journal review should be no more than one paragraph and should explain the nature of the journal, the audience it is trying to reach, the types of articles found in the journal (applied, theoretical, statistical, descriptive, etc.), and the types of materials included in the journal (book reviews, commentaries, software reviews, etc.).  Please bring copies of your journal reviews to pass around in class.

As you progress in your own research, you will find it beneficial to keep abreast of current publications in your particular areas of specialization within geography.  As journals are increasingly published online (and decreasingly accessible on paper), more and more services are available to help you stay current.  Two broad categories of services deliver tables-of-contents to you electronically.  These are e-mail alerts and RSS feeds.  For this assignment, you will familiarize yourself with the latter.

RSS feeds require a ‘feed reader,’ essentially a piece of software that collects and organizes your RSS feeds.  These are available as stand-alone pieces of software or as websites that store your information for you.  Bloglines (http://bloglines.com) and Google (https://www.google.com/reader/) are two prominent web-based feed readers.  The UO Libraries have some information on feed readers:

            http://libweb.uoregon.edu/guides/blogs/#rss

but an even better guide is provided by our Canadian friends:

            http://www.lib.sfu.ca/about/services/current_awareness.htm

For this assignment, familiarize yourself with a feed reader of your choice and in your review include the web address of the RSS feed for each of your journals.  You may also contact Jon Jablonski if you have any questions about finding the web address of your RSS feed.