UC Library Search
Search for your topic and narrow your results on the toolbar on the left under Resource Type > Articles. You can also select to Show Only > Peer Reviewed Journals.
Find articles
UCSB Library subscribes to hundreds of research databases, which are excellent tools to use for finding scholarly articles. Below is a selection of recommended databases for research in ES 161, many of which contain the full text of articles. If you do not see a link to the full text, use the 
link to find a different access point or to order a copy through Interlibrary Loan.
The complete list of databases, including descriptions, is here: A-Z list of databases.
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Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window Scholarly, multi-disciplinary database covering thousands of journals and other publications. Includes full-text access to peer-reviewed journals, and indexing/abstracts for magazines, monographs, reports, and conference proceedings.
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Communication Source (including Communication Abstracts) This link opens in a new window Full-text research database for communication studies. Offers hundreds of top communication journals, magazines and other sources covering all related disciplines, including media studies, linguistics, speech pathology, rhetoric and discourse.
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Business Source Complete This link opens in a new window Covers all disciplines of business, including marketing, management, MIS, POM, accounting, finance and economics. 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, SWOT analyses and more.
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Environment Index This link opens in a new window Offers deep coverage in applicable areas of agriculture, ecosystem ecology, energy, natural resources, marine & freshwater science, geography, pollution & waste management, environmental technology, environmental law, public policy, social impacts, urban planning, and more.
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Agricultural & Environmental Science Database This link opens in a new window Includes abstracts and citations from over 4,000 journals and other sources including conference proceedings, reports, monographs, books, and government publications.
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Google Scholar This link opens in a new window Enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.
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Water Rights & Resources Covers a wide range of water issues, including irrigation, hydropower, riparian rights, water conservation, drinking water quality, and tribal water rights, encompassing the unique water rights issues that span from the Eastern seaboard to the Great Lakes and across the arid West. Includes congressional documents, books, legislative histories on major legislation, and Supreme Court briefs on related cases.
Other Primary Source Documents
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Environmental Issues OnlineThis interdisciplinary multimedia collection uses primary sources, films, and photographs to support the study of key 20th and 21st-century environmental issues, including climate change, pollution, and conservation.
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Policy CommonsPolicy Commons is a one-stop community platform for objective, fact-based research, offering over 25 million pages of high-quality policy reports, briefs, analyses, working papers, and datasets from leading policy experts, nonpartisan think tanks, IGOs, and NGOs.
Finding News Reports
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Los Angeles Times - Current (1985-present) This link opens in a new windowSearchable and displayable full text of the Los Angeles Times from 1985 to the present.
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Los Angeles Times - Historical (1881-1995) This link opens in a new windowSearchable and displayable full text of the Los Angeles Times from 1881 to 1995.
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New York Times - Historical (1851-2008) This link opens in a new windowSearchable and displayable full text of the New York Times from 1851 to 2008. Note: current issues of the New York Times are listed on this page under "Creating Personal Accounts for Online Newspapers"
Creating Personal Accounts for Newspapers
Is it Peer Reviewed?
While specialized databases often index scholarly journals, they usually don't indicate if a journal is peer-reviewed. To determine peer review status, check the journal's website for author submission guidelines or consult a reference librarian.
Scholarly and Academic Journal Articles
Scholarly journals contain articles written by and addressed to experts in a discipline, presenting original research and often including field-specific opinions or advertisements.
Peer-reviewed (or refereed) journals are a subset of scholarly journals that send submitted articles to experts for critical review before publication. This process ensures the articles reflect solid scholarship, with authors often required to incorporate reviewers' comments. While not all scholarly journals are peer-reviewed, most peer-reviewed journals are considered scholarly.