Plan your research well in advance. You might want to take advantage of the University of Minnesota’s Assignment Calculator. Although you will not have access to the University of Minnesota’s resources, the calculator will give you an idea of when you should plan to complete particular tasks.
Plan ahead so that you can take full advantage of InterLibrary Loan and I-Share Universal Borrowing. ILL may take up to three weeks.
When using a journal database where the full text of the article you want is not provided electronically in that database, use the Find a Journal Full Text link to discover if Brookens Library has access to the article electronically or if we subscribe to the journal in print.
Tools for beginning a literature review
Environmental Studies resources:
General resources:
- UIS’s PrairieCat
This catalog gives you access to information about the holdings of Brookens library. It includes government documents, both print and electronic. If we do not have the item you’re looking for, make sure to repeat your search in the I-Share Catalog. You can then use the request feature to order items from other I-Share libraries.
- Web of Science
This resource is commonly used to find out who has been citing an article or work. This knowledge is important because seeing how often an item is cited can tell you about how important it is and how well-respected it is.
- Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Even though dissertations are not usually widely available, our ILL department has been able to get them for patrons. Dissertations are often written on narrow topics, and they can also help you with bibliography.
- Google Scholar
This search engine is still in beta testing, and is limited in range, but it can give you citations and sometimes links to full text for articles in scholarly journals and conference papers. Although conference presentations have not been through the scholarly review process, the bibliographies of these papers may prove useful. Use the “UIS Print” link to see if we hold the journal here at UIS in either print or electronic format.
- Wiley Interscience
This database offers selected full text articles from scholarly journals on environmental issues back to around 1997 and includes indexing of all 37 titles back to the first issue. Note: We do not have full text access to the online books or reference works.
Other resources that may prove useful:
Encyclopedias and Handbooks
Even though you may not cite these works in your thesis proposal, they can provide valuable background information, definitions, and statistics. Such works often contain signed entries by well-known scholars, and the article bibliographies can provide citations to valuable resources.
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