Geography, Maps, and the Annals: 67 years of History

Geographers are often asked “what is geography?”, and the number of answers to this question nearly equals the number of geographers. We (and others) argue that it is the spatial dimension that makes geography different, and that to do geography, one must communicate spatial information. Cartography is one of the key forms of spatial communication. However, the geographic literature often lacks maps. To examine this, we reviewed 67 years of the Annals of the American Association of Geographers to test any trends in the presence/absence of maps, the influence of editors, and how any trends related to changes in the field of geography. On average, 24% of the papers published did not contain maps. Roughly speaking, papers from the 1950s, mid-1970s through the 1980s, and from 2000–present were the least likely to contain maps. Papers in the 1960s, early 1970s, and mid-1990s contained the most. The influence of editors on the percentage of papers published without maps was significant, but weak. We found a relationship between the changes in numbers of papers with maps and broad changes in the field of geography. There was a slight increase in the number of publications that included maps during the quantitative revolution after World War II, which declined during the discipline’s shift toward social and critical geography in the 1960s and 1970s. In 2001, the format of the Annals changed from publishing all the articles in one section to dividing the publications in four thematic sections with different editors. From 2001–2017, the Physical Geography and Environmental Sciences section was the most likely to have maps (11.9% of articles without maps) while the People, Place, and Regions section was the least (47.7% without maps). Overall, the changes in the percentage of articles without maps can largely be explained by changes in the fields of geography and cartography—up to about 2000.