Literature Search

Mar-24 : In this lesson, we will search for a study to reproduce.

Goals and Expectations

Conduct a literature review of geographic studies and select a short-list of at least three candidate prior studies from the academic literature to focus on for a reproduction, reanalysis, or replication study.

The studies should have the following qualities:

• The study analyzes geographic data with geographic methods.
• The data is available, or at least data for important components of the study is available. This might mean that the authors have provided the data as supplemental materials or links to the data in repositories. Or, it might mean that the data is derived from pubicly available sources.
• The methodology is interesting to you and appears feasible to implement in R and/or Python. Either some or all of the code is available, or the methodology section of the paper is very clear.
• You may choose to work with one or two other students on a study if there are clear ways to share the effort.
• You may choose to implement a subcomponent of a very complex study, so long as the subcomponent of the study is interesting on its own and the authors provide subcomponent results for comparison.

For next class, prepare an annotated bibliography that contains, for each study:

• Full citation
• Main hypothesis or research question
• List of data sources and assessment of their availability
• Brief summary of methods and feasibility of implementing them yourself
• Motivation for selecting this study

Motivations

Motivations for reproducing a study may include:

• Intrinsic motivation to learn the methods and dive deeper into the study’s details in preparation for extending the study or applying it to other research
• Test the generalizability of the study by applying it to new spatio-temporal contexts
• Resolve questions about the study design by reanalyzing the data while altering selected methodological choices
• Weigh in on the credibility and validity of an impactful study
• Improve the reproducibility of an important prior study

Some possibilities

The following lists contains some possibilities for finding prior studies.

• AGILE Conference papers are supposed to be reproducible
• Search academic articles including keywords related to a topic and/or method and geographic approach (e.g. “GIS”, “geography”, “spatial”) and possibly keywords related to open science or open data sources (e.g. “R”, “python”, “git”, “GitHub”, “reproducible”, “open science”, “OpenStreetMap”, “figshare”, “OSF”).
• Complete a reproducible compendium for:
  Lyimo, Emmanuel H., Gabriel Mayengo, Kwaslema M. Hariohay, Joseph Holler, Alex Kisingo, David J. Castico, Niwaeli E. Kimambo, Justin Lucas, Emanuel H. Martin, and Damian Nguma. 2024. “Rapid Appraisal of Wildlife Corridor Viability with Geospatial Modelling and Field Data: Lessons from Makuyuni, Tanzania” Land 13, no. 10: 1647. https://doi.org/10.3390/land13101647
• Reproduce and update our prior studies on spatial analysis of COVID-19. These were written in separate scripts, and not in our modernized compendium template. They use sptial statistical methods. https://github.com/HEGSRR/RPr-Saffary-2020, https://github.com/HEGSRR/RPr-Vijayan-2020, or https://github.com/HEGSRR/RPr-Mollalo-2020
• Reproduce any studies on CyberGISX / I-GUIDE / Hydroshare

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