Digitization of the Journal Legacy: Improving Access and Literature Research Potential

Abstract

The Journal of Geoscience Education (formerly the Journal of Geological Education [1951-1995]) has been published for 65 years, but only articles from the last 15 years were available online (Table 1). Therefore, while JGE has been the primary scholarly outlet for geoscience education (Singer et al., 2012), ~80% of all published JGE articles were virtually inaccessible. This has limited the community's ability to do a historical analysis of geoscience education research, assess the strength of evidence on geoscience education community claims, or fully synthesize results. These challenges were raised by participants at the geoscience education research workshop at the 2015 Earth Educators' Rendezvous (http:// serc.carleton.edu/earth_rendezvous/2015/morning_ workshops/w3/index.html), and digitizing back issues of JGE was a specific recommendation that came out of that workshop. I am pleased to share that we are currently in the process of digitizing all of the JGE back issues, which is made possible by funding from the National Science Foundation. This is an important step for JGE and the geoscience education community. All past print-only articles in JGE will now be broadly searchable online and available for full text download, reading, and analysis. This project is making those resources accessible to all; they will be open access, searchable in the widely-used education databases EBSCO and ERIC, and available for free full text download at http://nagt-jge.org/ (click on Available Issues). The digital conversion started earlier this summer, and volumes from 1951 to 1964, and since 2001 are now available. Allen Press will be adding new batches of volumes over the next few months.Making the ~3000 print-only articles published in JGE prior to 2001 available for full text download, reading, and analysis will greatly increase access to foundational studies in geoscience education scholarship, and expand the timeframe and number of studies for inclusion in literature reviews. Earlier synthesis analyses of geoscience education results, including those by Perkins (2004) and by Pibern et al. (2011), the second of which was the primary source of geoscience education research data for the Discipline-Based Education Research (DBER) report (Singer et al., 2012), focused only on short (