LibGuides: Ecology: Journal Articles

Indexes and Databases

Use these tools to find citations, abstracts and/or full text materials on your topic. Sources of both scholarly and popular articles are included.

Biological Abstracts
Indexes over 5200 biological and medical research journals comprehensively. It covers every modern life science discipline including: agriculture, agronomy, biochemistry, biotechnology, botany, ecology and the environment, genetics, medicine, microbiology, neurology, pharmacology and zoology. Useful for undergraduates and graduate students. Coverage 1955-present.
Web of Science
Web of Science provides bibliographic and citation information in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities. It allows you to search for articles by subject, author, journal and author address in addition to citation searching. Coverage is from 1945 - present. See our Guide to Using Web of Science
Scopus
Scopus is a comprehensive international database for scientific, medical, technical, and social sciences. Topics include Biology, Molecular Biology, Immunology, Neuroscience, etc. and it is integrated with Scirus web search to cover the scientific web. It provides searching capability, linking to full-text sources, cited references, saved search and alerting features including RSS alerts. Coverage is from 1960.
Environment Complete
Indexes journals in the subject areas of agriculture, ecosystem ecology, energy, natural resources, marine and freshwater science, geography, pollution and waste management, environmental technology, environmental law, public policy, social impacts, urban planning, and more. Indexes over 1000 international journals, providing a global perspective on important issues. Coverage is from 1950-current

GEOBASE This link opens in a new window
A unique multidisciplinary database for development studies, the earth sciences, ecology, geomechanics, human geography, and oceanography. Covering over 2,000 international journals (both peer-reviewed titles and trade publications), and provides archival coverage of several thousand additional journal titles and books.
GreenFILE This link opens in a new window
This database 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.
Creating Permalinks to articles in EBSCO databases.

Agricola
Bibliographic database of citations to the agricultrual literature created by the U.S. National Agricultural Library and its cooperators. Production of these records in electronic form began in 1970, but the database covers materials in all formats, including printed works from the 15th century.
Environmental Evidence

General Sciences

Use these tools to find citations, abstracts and/or full text materials on your topic. Sources of both scholarly and popular articles are included.

General Science Index
Indexes general science topics in the life sciences, physical and chemical sciences and medicine. Includes subjects such as biology, botany, conservation, earth science and environment. Appropriate for beginning undergraduate science and natural science students who need to search general science topics. Coverage is 1984 - present.
Gale Academic OneFile Select
Provides access to the full-text of more than 3,500 periodicals including more than 2,000 scholarly journals. Citations (or abstracts) are provided for an additional 1,500 titles. Coverage of a wide variety of topics in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences makes it an excellent database for the initial stages of research.
Formerly Expanded Academic ASAP.
Research Library
An interdisciplinary database covering a broad range of subjects including arts, business, children, education, general interest, health, humanities, international studies, law, military, multicultural studies, psychology, sciences, social sciences, and women's studies. Coverage: 1971 - present.
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 50+ Proquest databases or to limit searches to subject areas including business, health and medicine, history, literature and languages, social sciences and more.
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.

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").

NOT - use to narrow a search and get more relevant results (e.g. "behaviouralism" not "humanism").

Truncation: used to find similar words with different endings

e.g. human* searches "human and humans"

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

asterisk (*) searches for various different endings of a word in most databases (including York University), however LexisNexis uses an exlamation mark (!).

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".