When looking for academic journal articles you can use the 'everything' search in Library Search or search directly in the databases below, which we’ve selected as being most relevant to your subject area.
Databases are the best place to find academic journal articles as they offer advanced search tools, metric data, and export options for referencing. These databases also often provide access to information types such as conference papers, book chapters, review articles, trade magazines, and more. BrowZine can also be used to explore e-journal titles in your subject.
While most of our collection is now available digitally, some titles may only be accessible in print. You can find these journal titles using an ‘everything except articles’ search in Library Search.
You’ll also find links to essential reading for your programme in your module reading lists on Canvas.
Key Databases and E-journal Collections
Databases will either provide you with the full text of the journal or they will give you the bibliographic details of an article. Where full text is not available, look for the
link and follow this to see if we have the full text available via Library Search.
Subject databases
Subject databases are tailored to particular subject areas. They tend to use precise terminology relating to the subject area, making searches more accurate, and can include subject specific tools and features.
- CAB Abstracts This link opens in a new windowCAB Abstracts is a comprehensive agriculture and land use database, containing information from 1910 to date
- Ecology Abstracts This link opens in a new windowEcologists will find in this journal the essence of current ecology research across a wide range of disciplines, reflecting recent advances in light of growing evidence regarding global environmental change and destruction. Ecology Abstracts focuses on how organisms of all kinds - microbes, plants, and animals - interact with their environments and with other organisms. Included are relevant papers on evolutionary biology, economics, and systems analysis as they relate to ecosystems or the environment.
With coverage ranging from habitats to food chains, from erosion to land reclamation, the journal provides an important cross-section of current findings in target research areas. Detailed information on resource and ecosystems management and modeling contributes to the journal's practical value, as does material on the impact of climate, water resources, soil, and man or growing environmental problems such as depletion, erosion, and pollution all topics which are covered in depth. Comprehensive, yet carefully focused coverage makes this an essential resource for scientists concerned with preserving the environment. - ENDS Report This link opens in a new windowAnalyses environmental policy and legislation and offers commentary and analysis on the implications for business across the carbon, environmental and sustainability agenda.
- Greenfile This link opens in a new windowGreenFILE 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 global warming, green building, pollution, sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, recycling, and more. The database provides indexing and abstracts for approximately 538,000 records, as well as Open Access full text for more than 5,800 records.
- Lyell Collection This link opens in a new windowThe Lyell Collection represents one of the largest integrated collections of online Earth Science literature available.
- Policy Commons: Global Think TanksGlobal Think Tanks is a collection of objective, fact-based research from the world’s leading policy experts, think tanks, IGOs and NGOs. It provides in-depth search and access to some 5 million reports from over 25,000 organisations.
- Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO): Mapping the World: Maps and Travel Literature
A collection focussing on travel and exploration during the nineteenth century, offering insight into the age of cartography and the rise of leisure travel. Features historical atlases, gazetteers, European and non-European travel narratives, and a variety of maps created during colonial exploration and expansion.
- Royal Geographical Society Digital Archive (with IBG)This database offers the digitized archives of the Royal Geographical Society from 1478 to 1953, and contains a range of primary sources, searchable manuscripts, correspondence, reports, conference papers, proceedings, maps, charts, atlases, photographs, surveys, data and ephemera produced by the researchers and members of RGS. The history of geography throughout the British Empire in all its aspects is represented in this collection, which also focuses on environmental history, exploration, colonization and decolonization, anthropology, law, climate science, gender studies and cartography. The content is presented as digital images, with searchable text and metadata, on a platform which allows for visual and textual analyses and is cross-searchable with archives from other societies in the Wiley Digital Archives program.
- Sustainable development goals onlineA variety of content from Taylor and Francis from books, journals and other sources which match onto the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Includes more than 12,000 of the most important and relevant book chapters and journal articles, published under the Routledge and CRC Press imprints, in an online library covering all 17 SDGs.
- Wiley Digital Archives: Environmental science and history.Explores critical aspects of anthropogenic change, with unique and rare archival collections from multiple, global sources, including collections on Deforestation, Agriculture, Livestock, and Fisheries (Food Production); Ecology, Botany, Biodiversity, and Extinction; Water Sources, Irrigation, Wetlands, and Hydrology.
Multidisciplinary databases
Much like Library Search, multidisciplinary databases cover a wide range of topics and are a great place to scope your search, or to use if your topic covers more than one subject area.
- Proquest Natural Science This link opens in a new windowThe Natural Science Collection includes key agriculture, aquatic science, biology, dentistry and nutrition databases, with many full text journals.
- ProQuest Social Sciences Premium Collection This link opens in a new windowThis collection provides access to databases covering the international literature in the social sciences, including politics, sociology, social services, anthropology, criminology and education. Together, they provide abstracts, indexing and full text coverage of journal articles, books, book chapters, dissertations, working papers and more. You can search across the whole collection or choose a specific database to retrieve information. Use the thesauri within the databases to identify alternative keywords.
- Web of Science This link opens in a new windowWeb of Science is a multidisciplinary database, which indexes scholarly journal articles, books, book chapters and conference proceedings. It provides cited reference searching, so you can navigate forward and backward through the literature to uncover all the information relevant to your research. Use citation reports to see citation activity and geographical trends and the ‘analyse results’ tool to identify trends and publication patterns.
- Scopus This link opens in a new windowScopus is a large, multidisciplinary database, which indexes peer reviewed journal articles, books, book chapters, conference proceedings and trade publications. It provides cited reference searching, so you can navigate forward and backward through the literature to uncover all the information relevant to your research and set up citation alerts. Other useful tools include citation overviews, author and affiliation searching, visual analysis of search results and a journal analyser and author identifier tools (if you are interested in publishing work).
- JSTOR This link opens in a new window
JSTOR offers full access to scholarly journals, e-books, thematic collections, primary sources, and images (Artstor) across many subject areas.
- Oxford University Press Journals This link opens in a new windowSearch journals published by Oxford University Press for a variety of subject areas.
- SAGE Journals Online This link opens in a new windowSearchable database providing full-text access to over 450 Sage titles. We have full-text access to almost all of them from 1999 onwards.
- Science Direct This link opens in a new windowScienceDirect provides full text-access to journal articles published by Elsevier.
- SAGE Research Methods CasesA collection of case studies showing the challenges and successes of doing research, written by the researchers themselves. They explain why the researchers chose the methods they did, how they overcame problems in their research and what they might have done differently with hindsight. Cases are peer-reviewed and cover a range of disciplines including social sciences, science, arts, technology and medicine.
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