Guide to Environmental Ethics Research at the Library: Philosophy 218, Prof. Gloria Gerkin  

This guide is designed to help you locate great research resources to support your Environmental Ethics classwork and assignments. If you need additional help please feel free to ask a librarian.  

For this class you're asked to prepare a total of four short (approximately 5 minute) presentations throughout the semester related to the topic of the day.  (Two of them must relate to ethical, structural or theoretical aspects.)  These will be abstracts and reports of refereed (a.k.a scholarly or academic) journals, web articles, news items, discussions, etc. whose content is relevant to this class. 

Prof. Gerkin is offering additional points when students choose articles from scholarly journals or widely regarded popular sources such as the Denver Post, New York Times, Time,  Newsweek, The Nation, Science, etc.   Not sure what a scholarly article is?  See the What's the difference? tab on this guide for a definition.

Finding articles for your presentation assignment.

• You'll find articles from journals, newspapers, and magazines using the article databases the Library subscribes to on the Library's Databases A-Z page.  You can get to these article databases when searching from off-campus, too.  When off-campus you'll be prompted to enter your name and student/faculty ID.
• When using the article databases, you'll use words describing your topic to unearth relevant articles.
• Most of the articles you pull up will be full-text online, within a few clicks of access.  Articles not owned by Auraria Library can be borrowed via Interlibrary Loan.

• Academic Search Premier Plus.   You'll find articles on all topics in this database from both popular and scholarly journals. (Here's a short tutorial on this database)
• America's News.  Here's a good place to look to find articles from U.S. newspapers. (Here's a short tutorial on this database). Want articles from non-U.S. papers?  Try LexisNexis Academic.
• Opposing Viewpoints.  Articles, essays in books, and other writings in this database present both sides of contentious issues.  For example, one of the environmentally-based articles from this database is:  Val Plumwood and ecofeminist political solidarity: standing with the natural other.

Here are some of the databases from the Library's Databases A-Z page that primarily contain scholarly (a.ka. refereed or academic) articles and would cover both environmental and philosophical topics.

• ScienceDirect. Includes articles from journals in the life, physical, medical, technical, social sciences, and a few in the fine arts and humanities.  
• Philosopher's Index.   The premier philosophy database, identifying writings from scholarly philosophy journals.
• Web of Science.  Indexes thousands of articles from science and social science journals.
• JSTOR. Articles covering most topics can be found through JSTOR.
• GoogleScholar.   Though this multiple-topic database is free on the web, used the link provided here, don't go to it direct on the Internet.  This link will help you quickly find the full-text articles that the Library supplies.