Olin Library Research Guides: RFLA 300: Global Sustainable Development: Getting Started

Introduction

The UN's Sustainable Development portal has a wide variety of information. However, several sections of the website will be especially useful to you:

The 17 goals
- The goals themselves. Key pieces of information are:
  - Targets: Sub-goals ("End all forms of discrimination against all women and goals everywhere")
  - Indicators: How to measure success ("Whether or not legal frameworks are in place"
  - Progress and Info: Gives a high-level summary of efforts to meet this SDG
Key Topics
- Pick a topic, and see which SDGs are associated with it.
- Example: "Small Island Developing States" has nine SDGs associated with it, including improving the world's oceans and countering climate change
- Please keep in mind that the SDG and the topic are highly related but not identical. For example, the topic of poverty eradication has "Eradicate poverty" as its associated SDG

Interdisciplinary Resources

Academic Search Ultimate This link opens in a new window
Academic Search Ultimate offers an extensive collection of peer-reviewed journals, magazines, reports, books, and videos covering various subjects like astronomy, engineering, health, law, mathematics, and more. It's a comprehensive resource for scholars in many fields.
BMI This link opens in a new window
Now known as BMI, this resource provides users with macroeconomic and financial fundamental data, country risk research and indices, industry research, and more. Clicking on this link will take you to your Okta account, where you can access BMI, formerly known as Fitch Solutions.

Google Scholar
If you have an article in hand, plug the title of the journal article into Google Scholar. Google Scholar will tell you who else has cited it. In general, the more citations, the more influential an article. Google Scholar is not useful for most research purposes beyond this one task.

JSTOR This link opens in a new window
JSTOR indexes backfiles of journals across the disciplines. They typically do not have the most recent issue of a journal; you will need to go elsewhere for that. JSTOR is particularly useful for book reviews.
ProQuest Research Library This link opens in a new window
Articles from scholarly journals, popular magazines and newspapers, in many different subject areas.
Sage Research Methods This link opens in a new window
A resource that discusses all aspects of the research process, including theories, literature reviews, research methods, and more. Includes methods from the humanities as well as the social sciences.
SAGE Research Methods is a research methods tool created to help researchers, faculty and students with their research projects. SAGE Research Methods links over 175,000 pages of SAGE’s renowned book, journal and reference content with truly advanced search and discovery tools. Researchers can explore methods concepts to help them design research projects, understand particular methods or identify a new method, conduct their research, and write up their findings. Since SAGE Research Methods focuses on methodology rather than disciplines, it can be used across the social sciences, health sciences, and more.
ScienceDirect This link opens in a new window
An interdisciplinary resource with a wide array of journals from the social sciences, natural sciences, business, and other areas.
Statista This link opens in a new window
A statistics portal that integrates data on media, business, finance, politics, and a wide variety of other areas of interest or markets on thousands of topics from a wide variety of sources.

These are general resources that will be useful to most people for more topics.

Subject-Specific Resources

These resources are often useful for researching a specific goal. For example, GreenFILE would be useful for goals related to climate change and life in the oceans. If you have questions about which resources would work best for your topic, please contact Blake.

AnthroSource This link opens in a new window
AnthroSource is a collection of all past and current publications of the American Anthropological Association, including journals, newsletters, bulletins, and conference proceedings. This includes the entire publication history of each title; the earliest journals in the collection date back to the late 19th century.
Business Source Complete This link opens in a new window
Provides full-text access to journals in all disciplines of business, including marketing, management, MIS, POM, accounting, finance and economics.
If you are looking for Harvard Business Review, this is the only database that has it in full-text. Please be aware that a handful of the most popular articles are blocked by HBR from downloading, printing or linking. You will recognize these titles by a thin yellow banner at the top of the screen. This embargo is HBR's policy, and there is no way around it....but please be aware that you CAN read these articles online.
ERIC This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
ERIC is an easy-to-use, searchable, Internet-based bibliographic and full-text database of education research and information. It is sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences within the U.S. Department of Education.
GreenFILE This link opens in a new window
Covers articles examining human impact on the environment. with indexing, abstracts, and some Open Access full text.
MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new window
The MLA (Modern Language Association) International Bibliography with full text provides access to an index as well as full-text content of books as well as articles published on modern languages, literature, folklore, and linguistics
Philosopher's Index This link opens in a new window
Contains indexes and abstracts from books and journals of philosophy.
PsycINFO This link opens in a new window
This database is published by the American Psychological Associations and provides comprehensive indexing and abstracts of the international psychological literature from the 1800s to the present. Documents indexed include journals, articles, books, dissertations and more. 90% of the 3,000+ titles indexed in APA PsycINFO® are peer-reviewed.
PubMed This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
The PubMed database is a literature database that contains citation information (title, authors, journal, and publication date) and abstracts of articles published in biomedical and scientific journals. PubMed does not contain full-text articles, but in some cases, you can link to full text directly from PubMed.
SocINDEX with Full Text This link opens in a new window
SocINDEX with Full Text features more than 2.1 million records with subject headings from a 20,000+ term sociological thesaurus designed by subject experts and expert lexicographers. Access contains full text for more than 860 journals dating back to 1908, 830 books and monographs, and over 16,800 conference papers.