EESC24 Advanced Readings in Environmental Science

Scholarly journals are where academics present their research and debate on discipline-specific issues occur.  As a student, you are now a member of the academic community and expected to engage with this literature.

Remember journal articles are extremely specific. If you don't know much about a subject area it might be best to start with your course textbook and other books. These will give you a broad overview of your topic and help you come up with keywords and ideas to more quickly find useful articles.  

As well, if you're studying an extremely recent event, you may not be able to find anything directly related in the scholarly literature because it takes some time for scholars to write about it. In this case, try researching related ideas instead. 

• They are often specialized by subject area (e.g. Biochemistry)
• They contain information not available through public resources like Google
• They are designed with scholars and researchers in mind - that's you!

You can search for individual e-journals using the library catalogue however today's online environment has made it possible to efficiently search across numerous journals, sometimes thousands, to find articles published in them that are relevant to a particular project or assignment topic. 

This means that rather than just searching one journal (for example, the Journal of Environmental Quality or the Journal of Chemical Education) you can use a research database to search across many journals that publish articles about environmental science issues. 

If you're not sure which database to search, try starting with the ones listed on this page. There are also tons of other databases grouped based on subject areas on the library's Subjects A-Z site.  There is also a listing of popular databases.

Not sure what discipline would cover about your topic?  Try multidisciplinary databases.

Tip:  No database has everything! It's highly recommended that you try a couple databases. If you're having trouble with your search, review this guide or ask your librarian, instructor or TA for help.

When searching for articles in research databases, look for the button* to link to the article's FREE full-text online. 

If we don't have an electronic copy of the article, it will also let you look for print versions of the article, or request it via Interlibrary Loan.  

If there is no "Get it!" link, or you experience problems, simply search for the journal in the U of T Library Catalogue.  When full-text is not readily available online, make sure you use the title of the journal (not the article title or author).

*Different databases have different full-text buttons so you might want to  also look for buttons labeled full-text or PDF.