Publications
Help
What type of information is in the GISS publications database?
The database includes citations to documents written by GISS researchers. They are primarily scholarly articles which have appeared in refereed scientific journals, but the database also includes some NASA Tech Reports, book chapters, conference proceedings papers, doctoral dissertations, etc. All entries include at least one author who was affiliated with the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, either while conducting the research described or later in his or her scientific career.
Many of the entries also include links to copies of the actual publications. These are usually complete copies, but a few are in preprint form and might be missing figures. Almost all are in PDF (Acrobat); a few may be compressed Postscript.
The publications homepage includes a "Simple Search" form. If you type in more than one word, the simple search assumes a logical "or" between your terms. For example, entering "global warming" means that the search will look for documents with "global" or "warming" in their citations and abstracts. A scoring system is used, so citations containing both words would be scored higher.
Also available via the navigation buttons on the Publications pages is an "Advanced Search". This search allows you somewhat finer control of the results, as you can require that certain terms appear in certain fields, e.g., search for papers published in 2004 containing "Mars" in the abstract. It also allows you to specify the sorting order.
Note: Neither search option allows for searching of words in the complete publication texts. At best they offer searching of abstracts.
When you are examining a citation or abstract, look for one of the following hyperlinks:
A "Download PDF" or "Download Postscript" link leads directly to a copy of the paper, and the link will probably give an indication of the size of the download. A "Go to document" or "Go to journal webpage" link leads indirectly to a copy of the paper on a server outside the NASA domain.
How do I save a copy of a report to my disk?
With PDF and Postscript documents, your browser is probably already configured to either display them in the browser window or to save them to disk. If not, then either right-click (Windows) or control-click (Macintosh) on the download link until a pop-up menu appears; look on that menu for an option named something like "Save this link as..." or "Download linked file as...".
If your browser is configured to display PDF documents in the browser window via a plug-in, you may need to right-click or option-click on the download link in order to force your browser to download the file to your hard drive.
If your browser does not display PDFs in the browser window, then you may need a copy of Adobe Reader or other PDF viewing program. You can download Adobe Reader for free.
How do I view a Postscript report?
You need a Postscript viewer such as the free programs GSview, ghostview, or Preview.app. Check shareware archives appropriate to your computer and operating system. You can also just save a copy of the report locally and queue it to a Postscript printer.
When I click on a Postscript report, I get garbage on the screen!
Your web browser is trying to display the raw file content in the browser window rather than download it to the hard drive. You must force the browser to save the paper locally.
How do I uncompress Postscript files?
If your browser does not automatically uncompress the files, you will need to manually use a separate uncompression program to do so.
When I view a Postscript report, the fonts seem impossibly small!
You probably do not have the correct fonts installed on your machine. Contact your systems administrator for assistance. The report should print without problem on your Postscript printer.
After the cover page(s), the first couple of pages of a Postscript report do not appear, and the report starts on page 2 or 3.
This is due to how some publications are constructed. They are actually many separate Postscript files, concatenated together. This confuses some Postscript previewers, but they should print without problem.
I see an interesting citation, but there's no link to a copy of the publication.
If you see an abstract of interest for which the complete paper is not available on-line, either here on the GISS website or on the appropriate publisher's website, check the GISS personnel list for the GISS-affiliated author's address. You may write him or her and request a reprint copy. If the author is no longer with GISS, you can check your nearest university or research library to see if it has the appropriate journal in the stacks.
