Coverage of Indian Earth Sciences in International Bibliographic Databases: GeoRef, GeoSEARCH and MINLIB

A comparative survey has been made of three keyword-indexed bibliographic computer databases, focusing on their holdings pertaining to the Indian subcontinent in general and India in particular. The selected databases include two very large, commercially available systems of the broadest scope, namely GeoRef (U.S.A.) and GeoSEARCH (including GeoArchive, U.K.) and a much smaller research database with selective bias toward economic geology and other themes (MINLIB, Canada). Qudstions of coverage, degree of overlap and applicability of these and other databases are addressed, with an eye to the evolving use of this technology in India. In terms of number of articles recovered for the ten States >150,000 km² in area. Bihar received the densest coverage (1.95 records/100 km²) with Karnataka second (1.64), the least-intensive coverage falling to the largest State, Madhya Pradesh (0.62) and Maharashtra (0.69).