Geography, Environment and Planning

You'll find many articles you'll need for your studies in Library Search . But there is a range of specialist databases which provide more sophisticated searches for journal articles around many different aspects of geography and planning.

While these massive databases  tend to have a broad focus that ranges across science, technology and social science, they are still useful sources to use when searching for journal articles, especially as they often have additional advanced features to help find relevant information.

Keep up to date with news and developments in your subject area by scanning some key journals:

Many databases which search for journal articles will also search for conference papers. Conference papers- sometimes also called conference proceedings- are articles based on presentations delivered at academic or industry conferences.  They sometimes feature complete pieces of research: but they often are based on preliminary results or work-in-progress from ongoing research. Conference papers may be published in the form of journals, books or websites.

Most conference papers don't go through the quality control process of  peer review in the same way as academic journal articles. However, this is not always the case, and some conference papers may have gone through peer review: check the details of the conference to find out if this is the case.

Because they are not always as extensive or rigorous as formal journal articles, conference papers are often considered to be not such high quality sources to use in your work. However, some conference papers go through exactly the same quality-control process as journal articles: and the latest conference papers can be very valuable because they will include new information and ideas that has not yet reached the journals. This is particularly true in the case of fast-developing areas of research.

While we have a few collections of conference papers, we don't have subscription access to most conferences. However, conference papers can be obtained via the document supply service in the same way as journal articles and can be supplied for free within a matter of days. The SHULinks option that appears in many databases will give you the links to request a conference paper via DSS.

You may also sometimes encounter conference abstracts. Rather than a full article, these are just short summaries of conference presentations. If you do find a conference paper and want to learn more about the research, it is often worth using a database to search for work by the same authors: in most cases, the authors will have gone on to write up and publish their research in the form of a journal article at a later date. This will give you a much fuller account of the completed research than the abstract or conference presentation.

As well as directly searching for specific subjects, there are also tools which will let you browse through journals and keep up to date with the contents of new issues of key titles.

If we don't have a journal article or conference proceeding in stock, we can ask another library to email a copy to you via our Document Supply Service. While it may not be possible to get absolutely everything, the vast majority of articles can be obtained this way.