Journal articles are important sources for your research as they contain the most-up-to-date research in a given field and often focus on a particular aspect of a topic.
To locate articles on your topic, use Omni or use a subject index or a database such as the ones recommended on this guide.
Because food systems are so complex and multi-faceted, research in this area can draw upon a wide variety of disciplines and resources.
Environment Complete: Covers environmental aspects of agriculture, ecosystem ecology, energy, renewable energy sources, natural resources, marine & freshwater science, geography, pollution & waste management, environmental technology, environmental law, public policy, social impacts, urban planning, and more.
Global Health: Covers the impact of agriculture on health.
GEOBASE: Consists of the latest information on the earth sciences, ecology, geology, human and physical geography, and environmental sciences. Focusing on the human and social impacts.
GreenFILE: Covers scholarly, government and general-interest titles on the connections between the environment and a variety of disciplines such as sustainable agriculture, education, law, health and technology.
PubMed: Medline (via PubMed) is a database of citations and abstracts in the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, health care systems, allied health, and preclinical sciences. It contains more than 26 million references from over 6,500 worldwide journals.
Sociology @ ProQuest: A pre-selected group of citation, abstract and full-text databases covering literature published in sociology.
Multidisciplinary databases index a great number of publications and allow you to search across the disciplines and are a good resource to use when you begin your research.
Academic Search Complete: Find articles in peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings, monographs and reports covering a broad spectrum of topics.
Canadian Business & Current Affairs (CBCA): Multidisciplinary database indexing Canadian magazines, scholarly journals, and news.
Google Scholar: Use the Google search engine to locate articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles published on the "open" web. Not a substitute for the article indexes and databases available at Queen’s University Library, however Google Scholar can be a useful supplement.
Scholars Portal Journals: Full-text access to articles from scholarly journals.
Web of Science: Includes both scientific and social aspects on various topics.
Scholarly journals are also referred to as "academic," "peer-reviewed," or "refereed" journals. One-way researchers try to ensure the legitimacy of their work is to have it peer reviewed prior to publication. A peer-reviewed or refereed journal is one in which manuscripts submitted by authors are reviewed by experts on the topic before being accepted for publication in the journal.
Indexes and databases contain a variety of types of articles including popular (magazine) and academic or scholarly or peer-reviewed (journals). If you are looking for scholarly or peer reviewed articles, you can typically restrict your search results to only peer reviewed journal articles by applying a search limit in the database.
For more information, please refer to: Distinguishing Scholarly Journals from Other Periodicals.