Find Information to Create your Proposal - TC 302: Prof. Walker - Climate - LibGuides at University of Texas at Austin

Scholarly Sources are Good Evidence

Scholarly sources (peer-reviewed journal articles, books, conference proceedings, etc.) serve as good evidence for proposals and arguments in higher education. Use these sources to find analysis and expert information about climate change and the impact on higher education, approaches to fossil fuel divestment, and more.

Library search box - searches across many, but not all, library resources. Great for finding information from a variety of disciplines in one search.

Tips:

Use advanced search techniques
try different keywords to hone in on your topic. After you search, you can use the menu on the left side to narrow to peer-reviewed articles, by source type and by year.
Try this sample advanced search that uses a variety of keywords.
- divestment AND (oil OR fossil fuels OR gas) AND (higher education OR colleges OR universities)
- use AND to require words appear in search results and OR to require one of the words
- In this example, multiple searches are simultaneously carried out that must include divestment and at least one term from each set of terms in parentheses. (A few permutations it searches are "divestment AND oil AND higher education", "divestment AND fossil fuels AND universities" and "divestment AND fossil fuels AND higher education).

Google Scholar - uses Google to search across scholarly sources. Use it through this guide or the library website in order to be passed through to library subscriptions instead of hitting a paywall.

Library databases (maybe you used Gale or Ebsco databases in hgh school?) let you search for information in a specific discipline. These are useful for diving deeper and doing more precise searching than you can often do in tools that search a broader swath of information.

Useful datatabases for this topic include:

Business Source Complete This link opens in a new window
Businesss/finance
Updated monthly. A scholarly business database providing a collection of bibliographic and full text content in all disciplines of business, including marketing, management, MIS, POM, accounting, finance and economics. Indexing and abstracts for scholarly business journals back to 1886 are included.
Searchable cited references provided for more than 1,200 journals. Contains detailed author profiles for the 20,000 most-cited authors in the database.
Additional full text, non-journal content includes financial data, books, monographs, major reference works, book digests, conference proceedings, case studies, investment research reports, industry reports, market research reports, country reports, company profiles, and SWOT analyses.
Education Source This link opens in a new window
education/higher education administration
"The collection includes full text for more than 1,700 journals, 550 books and monographs, education-related conference papers, citations for over 4 million articles including book reviews and over 100,000 controlled and cross-referenced names of educational tests. Coverage in Education Source spans all levels of education from early childhood to higher education and also includes educational specialties such as multilingual education, health education and testing.
EBSCO search tutorials
GreenFILE This link opens in a new window
enviro science, includes policy
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 global warming, green building, pollution, sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, recycling, and more. The database provides indexing and abstracts for more than 538,000 records, as well as Open Access full text for more than 5,800 records.

Peer Review in 3 Minutes

From the NCSU Libraries

How can I tell if it's peer-reviewed?

Many library databases will let you limit to scholarly/peer-reviewed articles. This is a great first step but you still need to check if its peer-reviewed yourself. Try one of these ways:

1. Google the journal title and read about the journal's process for accepting and publishing work. It should mention peer review, not just review by an editor.

2. Look up the journal title in a library database called UlrichsWeb. If it is peer-reviewed (refereed), there will be a little referee shirt there -

Find Examples of and Opinions about Divestment across Higher Ed in New Sources

Site limited Google search
Search for divestment using site:.edu to limit to colleges and universities. For more tips, see the "what is happening at UT" page of this guide.
ex: "fossil fuel" divestment universit* site:.edu
Inside Higher Ed
News and opinion covering higher education.

Chronicle of Higher Education This link opens in a new window
News and opinion covering higher ed.
Updated weekly. Provides news and information services of interest to faculty, administrators and students in the field of higher education. The full text of the current issue is available every Monday morning, following the Friday print publication. The current issue and the archive are both fully searchable, and the site also features an archive of more than 12 years of The Chronicle.
RSS News Feeds are available for this subscription. Email alerts are not part of the academic subscription. You must have a personal subscription to publication.

Where is the article?

If you don’t see a .pdf of the article you want, click Find it at UT to find it in another database or in print in the Libraries.

If it is only in print in the Libraries or we don’t own the article, click Get a Scan to have the article emailed to you.