Comparative Urban Policy: Research Guide: Find Articles

How to start looking for academic articles or studies

To find scholarly articles or studies, you will need to use a database (not CLIO). Scholarly journals are periodicals in which researchers publish articles on their work. Most often these articles discuss recent research. Journals also publish theoretical discussions and articles that critically review already published work. Scholarly journals are typically peer-reviewed journals.

Some search engines that search for periodical sources identify whether or not the sources are from peer-reviewed publications. On this page you will find a lot of options to start your research, but these are not all of the databases that you have access to as a Columbia University student! Explore the other research guides to find other databases for different disciplines, or make an appointment with a librarian. 

General, interdisciplinary databases:

  • ​​EBSCO: A powerful online reference system accessible via the Internet. It offers a variety of proprietary full text databases and popular databases from leading information providers.
  • JSTOR: Provides access to more than 12 million academic journal articles, books, and primary sources in 75 disciplines.
  • Project MUSE: Current collection of journals in the humanities and history, maintained by Johns Hopkins University Press. Full-text searching available. It also provides access to individual titles within the collection, such as Africa TodayAmerican ImagoContemporary PacificEthnohistory, and Public Culture, as well as to other interdisciplinary journals which may also prove useful to anthropological research.
  • ProQuest: This resource includes citations and full text articles in academic & professional disciplines, e.g., business, economics, gender studies, health, literature, management, political science; as well as news and general interest items. 
  • Scopus: Provides indexing, abstracting of and citation linking to journals in biology ,physics, chemistry, geosciences, agriculture, medicine, business, social work, and the social sciences.
  • Web of science core collection: Consists of seven databases containing information gathered from thousands of scholarly journals, books, book series, reports, conferences, and more."Provides access to records from the top journals, conference proceedings, and books in the sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities to find the high quality research most relevant to the area of interest. Using linked cited references, subject connections between articles that are established by the expert researchers can be explored.

Databases

  • Alt-PressWatch: Full text database of selected newspapers, magazines, journals of the alternative and independent press.
  • Associated Press collections online: Includes a decades' worth of wire copy, correspondence, memos, internal publications, and more.
  • EconLit: Comprehensive, indexed bibliography of worldwide literature on economics from over 300 major economics journals, books, and collected volumes. Coverage: 1969-present.
  • Environment Abstracts: Access to journal articles, conference papers, federal and state codes, federal agency regulations and decisions, and waste site data, and more.
  • Emerging Markets Information Service (EMIS): Full-text news, financial and economic information on emerging market countries in Latin America, Central & Eastern Europe, East, South and Southeast Asia, Southeast Europe, Central Asia and Caucasus, Africa and Middle East.
  • Factiva: Full-text database providing news sources from around the world. It also provides detailed facts, figures and analyses of companies, industries and financial markets. Coverage varies by source.
  • Govistics: Access to spending information for individual state and local governments across the U.S.
  • OECD iLibrary: Includes all OECD books, reports, periodicals and statistical databases. Coverage: 1988 to the present, updated weekly.
  • PAIS: Citations and abstracts for publications related to public affairs, 1915 to the present.
  • Public Administration Abstracts: Indexes articles related to public administration, public administration research, public administration theory, and other areas of key relevance to the discipline.
  • Sustainability Reference Center: Offers content from more than 800 publications, including journals, monographs, magazines on sustainable development, and human population topics.
  • Urban Studies Abstracts: Covers urban affairs, urban planning, city planning, community development, urban history, and other areas of key relevance to the discipline.

Don't forget

For interdisciplinary research topics, you may be better served by a guide for a different subject. The full list of research guides is here. Some examples that may be useful: