Natural Resources and Environment

GEOG 4204: Geography of resources

Note this guide is to be used as a starting point to find materials for your topic, and should not be mistaken as an all inclusive list of resources. If you are off campus, make sure to sign in above before using links to the databases and journals on this page.  If you are having trouble locating information for your project, contact Kiri Goldbeck DeBose

Resource Detective Project Guide to finding information

Websites

Use search engines to find your company's or product's website

• Google
• Clusty
• Yahoo!

Company or product home page (remember, often biased) and may/may not have information you need, but can be a good place to start in order to get general sense of the product(s) the company makes

       Tips for Evaluating Internet Information

Commodity resources

• FAOSTAT - statistics on commodities produced by the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) - view all statistical resources provided by the FAO here.
• The CRB Commodity Yearbook - in library use only - produced by the Commodity Research Bureau & BRIDGE Information Systems America Inc.

Summon and Catalog Searches

Use Summon to search for articles and books when there are not any well-defined or unique terms for your topic, or to get a sense as to "what's out there" as you search.  Use the facets on the left hand side to help narrow the results list to something manageable. 

Use Addison to find books about an industry or product manufacturing process.

Keyword searches: used when there are not any well-defined or unique terms for your topic, or to get a sense as to "what's out there" as you search.  Search using your commodity (e.g. hazelnuts) and if not many results, or nothing that looks like it will answer your question, try broadening the search (e.g. nuts)

   Some additional terms to think about using:

• manufacturing (e.g. manufacturing seafood)
• handbook (e.g. copper handbook)
• processing (e.g. nut processing)
• harvesting (e.g. crop harvesting)

Subject searches: used when there are well-defined and relatively unique terms for your topic, or you want a few highly relevant items retrieved.  Some subject searches:

• Subject = Environmental policy (country may be included for many - e.g. subject search for environmental policy italy)
• Subject = Manufacturing processes (can specify industry or processing type in advanced search as well)

Finding information about different countries:

Additional information can be found in other books and encyclopedias as well.

• The World Factbook (produced by CIA, general information of every country in the world)
• EIU (Economist Intelligence Unit) Reports (Country Reports (monthly) and Country Profiles (annual) available for over 200 countries. Variety of information dealing with government, economy, natural resources, etc)
• LexisNexis Academic (through country information)

News databases for product and industry research:

There are many places to find news information, the databases listed have a lot of information about businesses, products, companies, and industries:

• NAICS (North American Industry Classification System)
• ABI/Inform (articles about companies and industries)
• Business Source Complete (includes articles about companies and updates to industry trends)
• Business Reference Suite from RDA (includes articles about companies and updates to industry trends)
• Factiva (general news sources from many major newspapers and business publications. Generally start with a free text search)
• LexisNexis Academic (newspaper searching database to locate new stories across the world)
• Mergent Online (lists only public companies, useful for company profile information)
• Other Business and Industry Databases: Check the databases listed in the Business Subject Guides for additional resources you can access through the library. Marketing and general product information may be found in more than one business database.

Other databases:

• Academic Search Complete (broad searching of topics, good starting place to find basic information)
• Environment Complete
• Environmental Sciences & Pollution Management