We analyzed the corpus of three geoscientific journals to investigate if there are enough locational references in research articles to apply a geographical search method, on the example of New Zealand. We counted place name occurrences that match records from the official Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) gazetteer in the titles, abstracts and full texts of freely available papers of the New Zealand Journal of Geology and Geophysics, the New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research, and the Journal of Hydrology, New Zealand, for the years 1958 to 2015. We generated ISO standard compliant metadata records for each article including the spatial references and make them available in a public catalogue service. articles_georef_count_data.xlsx: The counts and evaluation tracking of the place name occurrences in the journal articles. summary_final.xlsx: Summary statistics for evaluation based on the counts data. article_template.xml: XML template for ISO 19139 compliant metadata record filled for each article. full_article.xml: Exemplary fully filled ISO 19139 compliant metadata record.