Articles - Urban Studies - Research Guide

General databases

In an interdisciplinary field like urban studies, general databases that search across many fields can be an excellent starting point.

Franklin: Articles+
Search most of the Penn Libraries' full-text holdings (journal articles, encyclopedias and bibliographies, magazines, newspapers, e-books).

Google Scholar
Access Google Scholar through Penn Library to get PennText links to full-text.
EBSCO MegaFILE
General, multidisciplinary periodical database, covering all scholarly disciplines, with many general and popular magazines, and news sources. Includes bibliographic citations with indexing and abstracts for more than 16,000 periodicals.
Scopus
Allows searching of citations backward and forward.
Proquest Dissertations and Theses Fulltext (formerly Dissertation Abstracts)
Indexing (since 1861) and abstracting (since 1980) for doctoral-level dissertations completed at North American universities. Fulltext of all available dissertations from 1997 to present, with some earlier dissertations

Subject Databases

For more in-depth searching, Penn Libraries provides access to variety of subject-specific databases.

Urban Studies Abstracts
Devoted to scholarly articles on urban issues.
Bibliographic citations with abstracts describing scholarly literature in all aspects of urban studies. Topics include trends in urbanization, urban history, architecture and urban design, housing and real estate, urban development and redevelopment, urban planning and land use, environment and resource conservation, transporation and communication, crime and law enforcement, urban economics, social services and public services, politics and government, urban fiscal and budgetary policy, and social issues.
America: History and Life
Article abstracts on the history of the U.S. and Canada, pre-history to the present. Search by city, or useful terms like "cities & towns," "urban growth," "urban planning," "urban policy," or "urban renewal."
Sociological Abstracts
The most comprehensive database in the field of sociology. Useful terms include "urban renewal," "neighborhood change," "urban poverty," and "community development."

Criminal Justice Abstracts with Full Text
Covers criminology, criminal justice, and corrections, as well as subject areas intersecting crime and illegal activities.
GEOBASE
A very large bibliographic database covering human geography, physical geography, and a wide range of topics having to do with people in spaces, including cities.

Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals
Covers architecture, archaeology, decorative arts, interior decoration, furniture, landscape architecture, city planning, and housing. Reflects the periodical holdings of Columbia University's Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library.

Journal of planning literature
The principal finding aid for planning literature. Provides lengthy abstracts for some items selected for indexing. Worth browsing, as each issue includes one or more literature reviews on topics of current interest.
HINT! To find literature reviews on your topic, do a "Search in this journal" for your topic. View an article that looks useful : click on the article keyword term to retrieve other JPL literature reviews on that topic.

PolicyFile
Indexing with abstracts of U.S. and foreign domestic and international public policy research literature.

PAIS
Index of social and public policy literature, with a strong international coverage. Useful terms include "cities & towns," "urban conditions," "urban policy," and "redevelopment."
• Worldwide Political Science Abstracts also covers the scholarly policy literature.

ERIC (Education Information Resource Center) - ProQuest
Education journal articles and reports. Useful terms include "urban education," "urban culture," and "neighborhoods."
HeinOnline
Legal research database containing fulltext documents (PDF) organized into collections including: Legal Classics, Law Journal Library, U.S. Supreme Court Library, U.S. Federal Legislative History Library, Treaties and Agreements Library, Subject Compilations of State Laws, and the United Nations Law Collection.

More article-index databases for urban studies ...

Evaluating Articles

For some classes, you will be asked to focus your research on scholarly articles. Scholarly articles (also known as peer-reviewed, refereed, or academic articles) are distinguished by going through the peer review process, in which they are evaluated and given feedback by experts in a field.

How can you tell whether an article is peer-reviewed? See "verifying peer-review" for more information.

Publication Types

Publications can be broken down into three general types: scholarly, popular, & professional (or trade.) For an overview of these publication types, see http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/scholarly_articles . (Click on the table below for larger type.)

Rutgers University Libraries. (2016). Journal types: A comparative chart. Retrieved from http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/scholarly_articles#4

For information on video, see the Penn Library Lounge's video "Scholarly & Popular Articles."

Verifying peer-review

There are several ways to verify that an article comes from a peer-reviewed journal:

Many databases will allow you to limit your search results to scholarly/ peer-reviewed items. (Note that using this limiter will eliminate books and dissertations from your results.)
Look at the homepage of the publication in which your article was published. If it is peer-reviewed, it will contain a statement about that.
Look up the publication in which your article was published in Ulrich's Periodical Directory. For peer-reviewed journals, the Ulrich's entry should list the publication as refereed and the content type as "Academic/Scholarly."