For first key word in search try using the petroleum province you are searching. On several attempts you may try different related geographic terms, such as “Persian Gulf” once, then “Iraq”, then “Saudi Arabia”, etc.
Try using two additional search terms, such as
“structural geology” and “stratigraphy” if there are two kinds of
information you are looking for. However, sometimes this restricts the search,
and you don’t get many “hits” (depends on how prolific the literature is
on that subject). If you get few “hits”, try just one search term besides
the one for the geographic region.
Some other possible key words
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Reservoir rocks |
Source rocks |
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Sedimentation |
Lithofacies |
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Depositional environment |
Paleogeography |
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Deposition |
Structural Geology |
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Sedimentology |
Petroleum |
Try using “Default Fields” as the field rather than “Title” or “Subject”, because if you use “Default Fields” the key word can be in a title, a subject, or a word in an abstract if an abstract is included. However, if the key word you put ends up being in the title of a publishing organization you will probably want to switch the field to subject. (For example if you put “West Texas” as a key word, you may get all the publications of the “West Texas Geological Society”, regardless of what the subject of the articles they publish are about.)
We would like to see you using fairly recent information. So in the large box of the GeoRef search page with the title “Refine Search”, restrict dates to 1980-2003. If you aren’t finding enough on your subject area, you may go back to 1970.
When searching for articles on foreign oil provinces, in
box for language put “English”, unless you are proficient in a
foreign language.
Also in the lower section of GeoRef “Refine Search” box
there is a field labeled “Category”. It will probably be best for the
present search to use “Economic Geology, Geology of Energy Sources”.
That will tend to direct the search toward papers dealing with petroleum,
without having to indicate Petroleum in the search fields at the top of the
GeoRef page.
Some of the “hits” you may get will be abstracts. (With GeoRef, the abstract is usually included on line when you click on that title.) These are very brief and will not be very helpful for you at this stage of the research game. However, AAPG had a couple of years in which presentations at their meetings were published as “expanded abstracts”. These would be a few pages long and might be useful. However, the AAPG publications that will be best will be from the AAPG Bulletin (which we have at ATU) and AAPG Memoirs. (Note, however, that sometimes the AAPG Bulletin publishes abstracts. In such cases the reference will just list one page.)
Try to find some papers that will be general and broad in scope, which will help you get the “big picture” on the petroleum-producing area you are studying. Papers like “The geology and petroleum resources of the Caspian Basin, Kazakhstan” or “Petroleum geology of the eastern Venezuela foreland basin” or “The western Gulf of Mexico basin: tectonics, sedimentary basins, and petroleum systems” would be very good ones, probably covering many aspects. They would give you a conceptual framework into which knowledge from other articles could be integrated. One article like this along with some other more focused ones would give you lots of information. On the other hand, you may not find an article so ideal as these. However, many of the more focused articles will still contain general information that you can put together to see the “big picture”. Some articles are extremely narrow in scope and should be avoided if you are able to recognize them.
You can also try on-line searching of USGS publications at the web site:
The searches done on that site will show all publications of the subject (author, etc) that are either published by the USGS or have one or more authors that are part of the USGS (that is, there may be an AAPG Bulletin article which has a USGS geologist as an author or co-author). Some of the USGS publications (e.g. USGS Professional Papers, USGS Bulletins) are available on-line. When you do your search, you will have a page showing papers that include the subject you searched. When you see one that looks good and click on it, a page comes up with details of the publication’s author, etc. If the publication you find is available on-line, there will be a link at the bottom of the page for it.