LibGuides: Urban Studies: Databases and Indexes

Indexes and Databases

Indexes & Databases

Indexes and Databases bring together a number of different online journals and other resources into one search engine. Use these tools to find citations, abstracts and/or full text articles, reports and other resources on your topic. Both scholarly and popular articles may be included.

Urban Studies Abstracts
This resource covers areas essential to urban studies, including urban affairs, community development, urban history. The index contains records which are carefully selected from the most important sources within the discipline and date back to 1929.
Urban Studies (Oxford Bibliographies)
This database provides over 80 annotated bibliographies on various topics related to the subject of Urban Studies. The focus is on specific cities and regions, foundational urban theorists, urban history, urban policy and planning, urban studies disciplines, and urban theories and concepts.
Environment Complete
Environment Complete contains records from domestic and international titles dating back to 1888. It offers coverage in applicable areas of agriculture, ecosystem ecology, renewable energy, natural resources, marine and freshwater science, geography, pollution and waste management, environmental technology, environmental law, public policy, social impacts, urban planning.
ProQuest
A single search screen that provides access to multiple databases for searching literature in a number of disciplines. It is possible to search across all databases or to limit searches to subject areas including business, health and medicine, history, literature and languages, social sciences and more.
Geobase
A multidisciplinary database that includes journals covering topics in urban studies and human geography.
Sociological Abstracts
Sociological Abstracts provides access to the world's literature in sociology and related disciplines, both theoretical and applied. The database includes abstracts of journal articles selected from journals in different languages from about 55 countries. Topics include anthropology, economics, education, medicine, community development, philosophy, demography, political science, and social psychology.
Canadian Business & Current Affairs Database (CBCA)
Provides references, and some full text articles, from Canadian journals, magazines, and newspapers. Also includes articles relating to urban issues.
Google Scholar
A subset of regular Google, it allows users to search for articles from all disciplines. Content is heavily skewed towards scholarly and scientific information; however, humanities and social science content is present, as is non-scholarly material.

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Search Tips

When searching online, various words are used to help broaden or narrow your search. Here are a few tips you should know before searching any academic database:

Boolean operators: Most internet and electronic databases follow the rules of boolean logic. Boolean logic refers to the relationships (connections or differences) between different search terms. The most common boolean operators are:

AND - used to narrow a search and establish more relevant results by linking keywords together (e.g. "behavioural" and "psychology").

OR - broadens a search and get more results. Typically used for synonyms and words with variant spellings (e.g. "self-actualization" and "self-identity").

Truncation: Used to find similar words with different endings

e.g. educat* searches "education", "educate", "educational" etc

Asterisk (*) searches for various different endings of a word in most databases but not all

Other Tips

Advanced Search - This option is available on most databases, and allows you to specialize your search based on documents (books, articles, video etc), date, geographic location, language, etc.

Quotation Marks - Using quotation marks will allow you to search for exact phrases. For example, searching "mental impairment" will only retreive searches with both "mental" and "impairment" together in that order.

Refine Search - Many online databases allow you to specify your search criteria after selecting your keywords and clicking on search.

Finding a Specific Journal - If you know the name of the journal you are looking for, type it in the library catalogue, then select "Periodical Title", then hit "go".