Environmental Sciences

Finding Environmental Sciences Information Quickly and Easily

•  Books – use the UNT Library Catalog. Search by keyword but keep it broad. Can use “author and title” search when you know a title word or two and the author. Searches books, names of journals, and media (music, DVDs, etc.) but not journal articles
• Journal Articles. Best to use Biosis Previews (see below). If there isn’t a link to the journal or the article from Biosis, use the UNT Library Catalog. Why the UNT Library Catalog? Because it is more than 95% accurate in telling you what we have available. The database are maybe 60% accurate, the E-journal options on the Electronic Resources page maybe 75% accurate, so the catalog is best. Use the “Journal Title” search tab and type in the complete name of the journal – abbreviations are usually not searchable.
• Electronic Resources (a way of lumping all journal article databases and other online things together). Using the “browse by category”, you can search for e-newspapers, e-encyclopedias (and there are several good biology/environmental sciences ones) and more.
• Biosis Previews – the best database for finding environmental science articles and other information. Located under the B in the Electronic Resources page
• Agricola – another good database, especially if related to agriculture. Available from the A list in the Electronic Resources page
• Web of Science. Good alternative database if the other two are not working. Covers significantly fewer journals but includes those that are supposed to be “the best of the best”. Also use for citation searching – when you have an article you want to follow and see who has cited it (included it in their bibliography) or you have an author that you want to see all papers they’ve published (remember that this is a pretty exclusive database though so you’ve missing a lot of the literature). If you create an account with Web of Science, you can set up search alerts (e-mails of articles matching your search terms), table of contents alerts, and citation alerts (when papers you select are cited, you will be notified)
• Science Direct. Although best used to provide journal articles, you can also use it to search for journal articles when the major databases are unavailable. It has a lot of journals but not all so Bioisis and Agricola are still best. By setting up an account, you can set search term alerts, tables of contents alerts, and citation alerts which can be useful in your research.