Research Guides: ENSC 310: Environmental Policy: Finding Articles

Research & Instruction Librarian

Maggie Gordon

she/her

Email Me

Contact:

Douglas Library
Room 520

Subjects: Biology, Environmental Studies, Geological Sciences

Tips for Finding Articles

1. Formulate a specific research question

For example: How does climate change affect Indigenous communities in Canada?

2. Identify the main concepts, these become your keywords

For this topic, our main concepts would be: climate change, Indigenous communities, and Canada

3. Brainstorm synonyms or related terms for each concept

Researchers might also talk about climate change by saying: global warming, climate warming, global cooling, climate cooling, etc.

4. Combine those terms using Boolean Operators (AND, OR, NOT), quotations marks, and brackets

("climate change" OR "global warming") AND ("Indigenous communities" OR "First Nations communities") AND Canada

How might this look in a database search?

Start Searching

Environment Complete
Deep coverage of 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.
Environment Complete contains more than 1,957,000 records, some with images, from more than 1,700 domestic and international titles going back to the 1940s (including 1,125 active core titles) as well as more than 120 monographs. The database also contains full text for more than 680 journals, including many of the most used journals in the discipline, such as Environment (back to 1975), Ecologist, and Conservation Biology. Additionally, Environment Complete provides full text for 120 monographs, such as Encyclopedia of World Environmental History (3 volumes), and Advances in Water Treatment & Environmental Management.

Date Coverage: Varies by title. 1940s to present.
GreenFILE
GreenFILE covers the connections between the environment and a variety of disciplines such as agriculture, education, law, health and technology. It offers indexing and abstracts for more than 850,000 records and open access full text for nearly 13,000 records.
GreenFILE offers well-researched information covering all aspects of human impact to the environment. Its collection of scholarly, government and general-interest titles includes content on the environmental effects of individuals, corporations and local/national governments, and what can be done at each level to minimize these effects.

Date Coverage: Varies by publication.

Scopus
Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database, including peer-reviewed titles from international publishers, Open Access journals, conference proceedings, trade publications, quality web sources.
Date Coverage: 1788-present (updated daily)
Web of Science
A large, multidisciplinary database, Web of Science provides access to bibliographic information, author abstracts, and cited references from scholarly journals and conference proceedings. A cited reference search enables you to find articles that cite a previously published work.
This database consists of these subject components, which can be searched simultaneously or individually (to search individually, limit to required citation database(s) at bottom of screen):

Science Citation Index Expanded - science and technology journals from 1900-present
Social Sciences Citation Index - social sciences journals from 1956-present
Arts & Humanities Citation Index - arts and humanities journals from 1975-present
Conference Proceedings Citation Index - Science (CPCI-S) from 1990-present
Conference Proceedings Citation Index - Social Science & Humanities (CPCI-SSH) from 1990-present
Journal Citation Reports (listing impact factors and other journal performance metrics) are available through Web of Science.

Science Citation Index: 1900 - present ; Social Sciences Citation Index: 1956 - present ; Arts and Humanities: 1975 - present
Google Scholar
Free access

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.
Should you encounter a captcha problem, you can still search QUL resources by going to https://scholar.google.com following the instructions here.

This is not an exhaustive list of all Environmental Studies journals. You can browse more here.

Where's the Article?

If the full-text is not available in the database, click on the Get It @ Queen's button to see if the article is available electronically (either from a journal or another database) or in print.

If the article is not available, you can request a copy using Interlibrary Loans. It's free!

Is it scholarly/peer-reviewed?

If you want to know whether or not a journal is peer-reviewed, look it up using:

Ulrichsweb.com - Ulrich's Periodicals Directory
Ulrich's International Periodicals Directory provides detailed, comprehensive, and authoritative information on journals, magazines, newspapers, and other serials published throughout the world. The web version is popularly known as: ulrichsweb.com.Content: Covers all subjects and includes publications that are published regularly or irregularly and are circulated free of charge or by paid subscription, totalling nearly 230,000 titles from 80,000 publishers and corporate authors in over 200 countries around the world. Provided for each title are: descriptions, subject classifications and order information, as well as links to tables of contents, article abstracts, journal full-text, and document delivery sources.Reasons to use: In addition to searching for bibliographic or publisher information about a serial title, one can use Ulrichs to find where a journal is indexed (in order to then use that tool as a means of searching for articles within the journal).

Depending on the database, you may also be able to refine/filter your results by publication type (i.e. book, peer-reviewed article, literature review, conference proceeding, etc.).