Geographical research and the problem of variant place names in digitized books and other full-text resources

Geographical research often involves searching for place names in full-text resources, such as digitized books. Place names often have variants, resulting in many different names for a single geographical place, a problem that can lead to missed results in full-text searches for place names. The problem occurs because full-text search engines merely match words in the search box with words in online documents, leaving place-name variants unsearched. This paper describes how relevant resources can be missed due to this problem and describes the different sources of place-name variation. Finally, the paper describes some solutions to the place-name variation problem in full-text searching.