Your Librarian
Research Question?
Visit the Tutorials guide for more research help.
Websites
Environment and Society Portal, a "gateway to open-access resources about human participation in, and understandings of, the environment"
from the Rachel Carson Center for the Environment and Society.
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Getting Started with Research
with a tutorial on Using Sage Research Methods to do a Literature Review
NOTE: It is normal for your research question to change or evolve as you work on the literature review and find more information about your topic.
Looking for a topic?
Click on this link in the lower right side of the webpage to see the entire list of issues, such as
Air Pollution, Agribusiness, Climate Change, Fracking, Nuclear Energy, Oil Spills, Ozone Depletion, Recycling, etc.
If you use Google--remember to evaluate the source--the search below found articles from National Geographic, NPR and the New York Times.
A quick read of popular (non-academic) articles can provide some research leads and links to reports, studies, journal articles. The National Geographic article mentioned an engineer who wrote a report on the topic of recycling plastic..
Keep your search simple
- Search the most obvious, broad term first; see what you get. You can narrow your results from there.
- Don't complicate your search. 1-2 terms may suffice.
- If you need to retrieve more information, then expand the number of terms you use
This is when it helps to keep track of your search terms and resources. Here's a sample search table on this research topic
Part of the research process is asking the question "what about . . . .. ?" to narrow down the topic.
A possible approach could be researching zero-waste--read about a zero-waste city Kamikatsu, Japan or
reducing the use of plastic--> click on image below to see video.
