The comprehensive Earth science database, GeoRef, is introduced in this paper. GeoRef is one of the Earth science databases with the largest number of references (about 2.2 million), and is managed by American Geological Institute (AGI). GeoRef provides not only an environment for searching references, but also for delivering the necessary references and for making written reference lists.
To verify the usefulness of GeoRef, we compared several cases of searches using GeoRef, Web of Science and Swet Scan. Although GeoRef was not able to pick up more references than Web of Science, GeoRef generally collected suitable references and showed its usefulness of searching particularly in the geological category. However, it was revealed that GeoRef was relatively slow to incorporate the latest information.