INTRODUCTION

A long overdue update of the ‘Bibliography of the Geology of Indonesia/ SE Asia ’ is now available online here. Unlike previous editions, Edition 8.0 is in two parts. Volume 1-Indonesia (also including North Borneo, Timor Leste and PNG main island) contains 2640 pages with ~20,700 references, while Volume 2-Circum Indonesia contains 1060 pages with 8140 references.

Compared to the previous Edition 7.1 of June 2020, more than 5000 titles were added (a 22% increase). There is also much improved annotation, both as new annotation and as many updates of original annotation. In addition, Edition 8 contains >12,000 links to open access papers).

This Bibliography started off as a 700-page pdf addendum to the paper of Van Gorsel (2009) in the Proceeding of the 33rd Annual Convention of the Indonesian Petroleum Association, Jakarta (on IPA33 CD-ROM edition). Edition 3 in 2011 (1099p.) was the first online edition (www.vangorselslist.com). This was followed by updated editions 4 (2011), 5 (2013), 6 (2016), 7.0 (2018) and 7.1 (June 2020; 2826p., 23,720 titles). It may be worth mentioning that this Edition 8.0 contains more than five times the number of titles in the first Edition of 2009. So please discard any old versions!

The current and complete pdf can been found using the following links:

Download pdf - EDITION 8 - 2026 - Volume 1 - Indonesia (23.61 MB)

Download pdf - EDITION 8 - 2026 - Volume 2 - Circum-Indonesia (10.82 MB)

Please note, the pdfs in the individual topical website pages have been updated with this release but the content on some of the website pages still reflects the content as of July 2018.

Purpose

The purpose of this bibliography is to facilitate access to the vast heritage of geological studies in Indonesia, as well as that of surrounding areas whose geological characteristics extend into parts of Indonesia (mainland SE Asia, SW Pacific, NW Australia). Awareness of the vast body of existing literature on the geology of Indonesia should improve the quality of future work, limit redundant research and maintain credit where credit is due.

Many of the papers listed here are hard to find or have been ‘forgotten’. Lack of access to geoscience libraries, foreign language barriers, cost of purchasing and available time for reading causes much of this valuable geoscience heritage to be under-utilized. Many of the ‘old’ papers still contain information that cannot be found elsewhere, or research results that would be difficult to replicate today.

This is a reminder to the geoscience community that ‘we are standing on strong shoulders’ and reading is important. The publications in this listing contain the results of work by thousands of geologists, tens of thousands of men-years and many billions of $$ on survey work and studies ! And remember: the most recent paper on a topic is not always the most useful.

Numbers of papers by chapter / area

Table I below shows the chapters and numbers of titles in the bibliography (status as of August 2018)

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE GEOLOGY OF INDONESIA AND SURROUNDING AREAS

Publication trends through time

Figures 1, 2 and 3 illustrate historic trends in the publications on the geology of Indonesia, i.e. total numbers of publications, areas of interest, dominant languages, areas of interest and nationality of lead author, which all changed significantly trough time, reflecting changes in political situations, economic drivers and scientific developments over the last 150+ years.  These graphs only include the ~11,000 papers that deal specifically with geology of areas in Indonesia, and do not include 'special topics' or 'Circum-Indonesia' papers (~50% of total in this Bibliography 7.0).