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HLTH 235: Food Systems

Accessing the Full text of the Article

If the full text of an article is not in the database you are searching, click on the Get it @ Queen's icon and follow the links (please note that not all articles are available online).

 Get It Link Icon

When should I search subject specific indexes or databases?

Omni is only one part of a complete search. Omni includes content from the various research databases to which QUL subscribes but not everything is included.

If you are looking for information on a very specific topic, or a topic that is subject specific, it is recommended that you search databases that specialize in that subject area for more thorough results. You may want to search more than one as they index different journals (as well as different types of resources).

To locate articles on your topic, use an index or a database recommended below or click on the Database link on the library homepage which will take you to Database Search.

Recommended Indexes and Databases

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.
  • iPortal: Indigenous Studies Portal: Is a database of full-text electronic resources including articles, e-books, theses, government publications, videos, oral histories, and digitized archival documents and photographs. The iPortal content has a primary focus on Indigenous peoples of Canada. 
  • 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

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.
  • Omni: Provides access to extensive collections of scholarly information.
  • Scholars Portal Journals: Full-text access to articles from scholarly journals.
  • Web of Science: Includes both scientific and social aspects on various topics.

Refine Your Results

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.

Limit your search to Peer Reviewed articles, to Source Types such as Academic Journals or by Publication Date

Using Boolean Operators

Most library databases provide the option to select Boolean Operators on the Advanced search screen, so all you have to do is select the operator you want from a drop-down box between search boxes.