It would be delusive and pointless to try to reference every single contribution produced across time in every single format (theses, books, papers, conference minutes, etc.) in every context (cultural, linguistic, regional, etc.). Nonetheless, an optimally representative selection of literature must be put forward based on criteria such as reliable, significant critical mass, evolution and diversity of works produced, accessibility of sources, and the epistemological demands of such an undertaking. This means privileging certain sources, the most appropriate of which are undoubtedly papers published in scientific journals.

One of the first things we note is that such journals have historically expressed, enabled, and assisted the establishment and development of academic disciplines. Furthermore, the emergence of new journals in an already established and recognized subject area can often reflect the emergence of new paradigms or major forks in the subject, and at the very least new and varied sensibilities. Tracing these journals and their evolution through time is a little like retracing the history of a subject itself, or at least its recognition in the formal academic field. What place do Indigenous people issues occupy in this history? Since when and in the light of what contexts have geographers become interested in indigeneity? What journals have they chosen for the publication of their works?

Probing geographers’ interest in indigeneity through scientific journal papers would seem to meet the epistemological demands of the proposed research. This approach should for example allow the identification of possible affinities with specific fields of geography (cultural geography, political geography, etc.), or if not then the distinction of different ways of looking at and dealing with indigenous issues in geography. On the understanding that journals represent forums of exchange and debate in which the discipline’s evolution and orientations are at least partly played out, it would seem relevant to have a viewpoint on the place so far occupied by Indigenous peoples and their issues. In addition, we must always remember that a published paper has been subject to peer and editorial committee review, which, in a way, is a gauge of its “acceptability” by the scientific community. Inventorying papers published in scientific journals on Indigenous Geographies thus amounts to assess the acknowledgement of indigeneity as a real component of geography. Furthermore, since publishing a paper in a journal may actually be considered as the most common type of scientific communication, we can reasonably expect a corpus formed on this basis to properly reflect the diversity and evolution of geographical approaches to indigeneity.

We should moreover mention an aspect that although very pragmatic is far from negligible, namely the accessibility of sources. By definition, a journal is a periodic publication whose volumes form a more easily searchable collection than impromptu output such as books (or their chapters), theses, and conference minutes. Seeking impromptu content whose existence is not a given understandably owes a lot to chance, while collections that stem naturally from journals lay down a framework in which a systematic, exhaustive listing can be planned. In this respect, the act of putting reviews online, combined with digitizing of much older volumes, allows bringing this task to completion.

Narrowing thus the horizon, with the de facto exclusion of other types of scientific output, can obviously be judged arbitrary, but it undeniably constitutes a best compromise in terms of both the epistemological interest of the project and its feasibility, as well as from the point of view of constituting the necessary significant corpus that can reflect the diversity and evolution of geographical approaches to indigeneity.

The first question to be settled is of course the ability to determine which journals must be searched and so be the subject of systematic inventorying. This throws up an immediate methodological difficulty inasmuch as authors do not necessarily nor exclusively publish all their works in journals specializing in their own subject area. This is notably true among geographers, who besides publishing papers in geography journals also often turn to numerous other journals that define themselves as inter- or multi-disciplinary. When this reality is factored in, it results in an extremely broad spectrum of possibilities. So once again, the horizon must be narrowed to ensure the task remains feasible.

Regardless of any other choice made, the systematic inventorying of geography journals, i.e., those directly and explicitly concerned with the subject area, remains an imperative. Let us therefore define a “geography journal” as one whose publication is by an entity, anywhere in the world, whose stated mission involves geography, such as geographical associations or societies, university departments or institutes of geography, etc. One difficulty arising at this level concerns the identification of all relevant publications. This difficulty can be overcome using various systems to cross-index and consult journals in order to form a target corpus. Six main indexing systems, all with international scope, have been consulted and used:

• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
• Index Copernicus International (ICI)
• International Scientific Indexing (Web of Science)
• Scielo
• Scimago Journal & Country Rank (SJR)
• Scopus (Elsevier)

The inventory compiled on this basis was then expanded with input from country-specific indexing systems, like the one established by HCERES (formerly AERES) in France or CAPES in Brazil. Also, various journal online hosting platforms with free or limited-access were consulted:

• Dialnet
• Elsevier
• Erudit
• JSTOR
• OpenEdition Journals
• Persée
• Project MUSE
• Redalyc
• Sage
• Springer
• Taylor & Francis
• Wiley

Last but not least, the International Geographical Union Journals Database (Journals Project), which sets out to catalogue all journals worldwide that might hold interest for the geography community, was also consulted in order to complete the inventorying operation.

However, these resources can easily escape the strict framework of “geography journals”, so a filter had to be implemented to allow only those publications dealing exclusively with the subject area as defined above. Inter- or multi-disciplinary journals of potential interest to the geography community were therefore purposely dismissed in this first inventorying phase, considerably reducing the volume of titles and leaving only the essentials.

Once the list of journals to be comprehensively inventoried was established, target papers were identified and collected by applying a set of keywords in the search engine of each journal’s website, or by consulting the ten-year index if journals were not or incompletely available online. This keyword-based search was applied to the published papers’ titles, abstracts, and keyword lists. In the absence of abstracts or keywords to help detect the relevance of a paper’s content, categorization had to be based on the paper’s title and a reading of the introduction.

These keyword-based searches were performed in the main language of the journals, albeit restricted to the four languages (French, English, Spanish, and Portuguese) known and mastered to various degrees by the database author. For journals published in other languages, e.g., German or Russian, the search was made in English, taking advantage of most journals’ increasingly routine provision of English translations of the papers titles, abstracts, and keyword lists.

The choice of search terms for assessing target papers focused on the most commonly heard terms in the source language when discussing indigeneity. In English, for example, the terms Indigenous, indigeneity, Aboriginal and aboriginality were used to identify target papers. After this, other terms, more specific to each journal’s context, were used to further narrow the search. Taking English examples again, this was materialized by seeking the ethnonym Maori in New Zealand journals or the expression small people in Russian journals as well as those taking a special interest in Nordic areas. Deprecated terms or ethnonyms like Eskimo, now supplanted by Inuit, were also applied in some cases to seek out older papers in journals that boast a long existence.

A final important point is that only peer-reviewed papers have been selected. Research notes, comments, and other types of publication that fail this judgement criterion were dismissed. Besides the criterion’s usefulness as a common benchmark enabling a single database to gather elements appearing in different journals and languages on different dates by authors who have worked in a broad diversity of regions and contexts, it is also a way of validating the published content. In short, papers inventoried on this basis may be considered as comparable.

The corpus compiled from the collected papers was then analysed through the prism of each authors’ training and academic profile. Geographers were discriminated from non-geographers in order to extend the search perimeter to works published by geography specialists in journals outside their main subject area. In the case of jointly signed papers, only the first-named author was considered. On this basis, extending the search perimeter attempted to assess the potential for more openness and the ability of Indigenous Geographies to feed on and into debates lying at the crossroads of different approaches and disciplines.

In that respect, a biographical search on each of the papers’ authors was conducted based on information available on their institutional pages as well as their accounts on the Academia and ResearchGate academic networks and the LinkedIn professional network that they may have elected to join. Persons with no training in the field of geography were then overlooked in the extended search, keeping only their papers published in geographical journals. By contrast, those with at least a diploma at any graduate level awarded by a higher education institution explicitly teaching geography underwent a more thorough research of their publications. In the case of authors with a multi-disciplinary academic path—e.g., initial training in history or anthropology followed by post-grad and/or Ph.D. in geography—only their output as geographer was included.

An exhaustive search of the selected authors’ publications—still limited to peer-reviewed papers and filtered on the same criteria as indicated in Step 2—was performed on the basis of institutional pages consulted beforehand and of works listed in the Academia and ResearchGate accounts. But insofar as not all authors maintain such accounts or maintain them vigorously, the research invariably extended to Google Scholar, which generally lists the whole output of a given author. The information aggregated from these different sources enabled bibliographical research beyond the pure geography field, thus measuring to a certain extent the interdisciplinary potential of Indigenous Geographies.

The papers collected through the previous steps were then compiled in a single Excel file in the form of a database organized according to various criteria. Each paper referenced therein is first broken down into a series of basic entries including, successively, the author’s or joint authors’ names, the paper’s title, and the journal’s name, issue, and publication date. These so-called “basic” entries were furthermore completed by a set of secondary criteria enabling the classification of papers by publication language, interested geographical regions, and major topics. These last two criteria warrant further explanation:

• The collected papers are classified according to 6 main geographical regions, based broadly on the seven socio-cultural entities determined for indigenous representation at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII): (1) Africa and the Middle East, (2) North America, (3) Latin America and the Caribbean, (4) Asia, (5) the Arctic and Sub-Arctic, (6) Oceania and the Pacific. The UN’s regional definitions also include a seventh entity with the Russian Federation (excluding the Arctic region), and the states of Central and Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Transcaucasia. In the INDIGEO database, this seventh region is incorporated in the Asia region, thus anchored on a broad geographical definition. The other variation worth mentioning concerns countries comprising the “Near-East” and “Middle-East”. The UN includes these with Asia whereas the INDIGEO database groups them with the African countries due to their greater cultural and other ties with North African countries, forming what is commonly identified as the “Arab World”. A final important point is that papers in the form of essays, without reference to a specific country or region, or conversely those that put forward multiple case studies covering several regions among those identified above, are classified as “Transregional”.

• The collected papers are also classified according to a list of 27 major topics, spanning the diversity of approaches and issues tackled by authors interested in the geographic realities of indigenous peoples in various regions of the world. These major topics, whose number and content were adjusted while completing the reading of the abstracts from inventoried papers, cover relatively broad fields that could easily be split down into more specific subtopics. As things are, they do show the usefulness of uncovering not only recurrent, structural base issues but also certain trends and recent or less recent dynamics, while providing a view of how the geography community’s interest in indigenous peoples has evolved over time.

When added to the work of scrutinizing all the geography journals, the exhaustive search of each author’s publications is a time-consuming undertaking that inevitably unfolds over several years. The possibility of drawing up a first global summary of the database that is consistent and usable implies stopping the research at a given theoretical date, both for each author and for each of the journals in the defined scope. A bibliography watchdog was thus implemented to collect—retrospectively from the date of the initial specific inventorying of each author and each journal—any new publications falling inside the perimeter of investigation.

This constant upgrading was facilitated by setting up automatic alerts, using Google Scholar along with journal websites that offer such a service, for following the activity thread of identified authors and targeted journals alike. Coupled with periodic verification of the authors’ Academia and ResearchGate accounts and the websites of those geography journals that do not offer alerts, this lookout system is also useful and relevant with respect to the database’s updating and continual development requirements. In this sense, the implemented bibliography watch is also meant to enable identification of emerging dynamics or trends, concerning the spatial dimension of the realities Indigenous peoples in the world are faced with on one hand, and the attention the scientific community can pay to it and the way it can—or indeed cannot—assimilate it on the other.