Waldo Tobler's publications span between 1957 and 2017, with his most productive year being 1973. Despite retirement in 1994, he continued to be involved with research for the remainder of his life. Most of his publications consist of peer-reviewed journals, without single-issue textbooks or monographs, and the quantity of publications is noted as being unremarkable compared to modern geographers. Many of his works are foundational to modern geography and cartography, and still frequently cited in modern publications, including the first paper on using computers in cartography, the establishment of analytical cartography, and coining Tobler's first and second laws of geography. His work covered a wide range of topics, with many of his papers considered to be "cartographic classics", that serve as required reading for both graduate and undergraduate students.

The First Law of Geography, according to Waldo Tobler, is "everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things." This first law is the foundation of the fundamental concepts of spatial dependence and spatial autocorrelation and is utilized specifically for the inverse distance weighting method for spatial interpolation and to support the regionalized variable theory for kriging. The first law of geography is the fundamental assumption used in all spatial analysis.