58123 – Society Economy and Globalization – Handout
By: David Litting (david.litting@uts.edu.au / 95143390)
(please contact me or Jemima McDonald at any time for research assistance)
Jemima McDonald (jemima.mcdonald@uts.edu.au / 95143726)
Topic: Economic trade and development/globalization
Library Resources for you to consider:
The Catalogue: Books are a good place to start researching your topic. They
provde a historical focus, weave elements of information together, and
provide context to other more specific information, such as you might find in a
journal or in a statistical table.
Approach – enter the word that describes your commodity (ie:
coffee/soy/uranium/cocoa etc) and combine with a word that describes an
aspect of trade (economics/trade/globalization/sustainability/ environment/
poverty )– see below:
Depending on what you are looking for you may find you have more books
than you need, but in case you don’t find enough try the BONUS catalogue:
The Bonus catalogue can be accessed from anywhere you see the green
BONUS icon, like a uts book record, or the ‘classic catalogue’.
Journal Articles: Use journals to fill in gaps that the books leave behind.
Journals are shorter and less broad in their focus than books, but there are
more of them and they are faster to read and digest. Say you are researching
Coffee and have most of your information from books but the books didn’t
cover the environmental impact of growing or you’re studying Tuna and need
info about the way tuna has been used historically across cultures – then you
may be able to fill these smaller gaps with journal articles. You can search
journal articles using Databases.
Databases: Databases provide a search engine where you can find journal
articles. You can access lists of databases that are relevant to your subject area
from the ‘ find databases’ box on the home page, which underneath the
catalogue box (see previous graphic), and also from the study guides. The
screenshot below is a list of International Studies databases you can link to
through the ‘find databases’ button on the UTS library website
Database example: EBSCOhost
EBSCOhost is an alternative to the databases in the list above, and can be
accessed by typing ‘ebscohost’ (one word) into the library catalogue.
EBSCOhost is actually many databases, so you can choose which topic areas
you’d like information on. A good pair of databases to choose when you login
to EBSCOhost are ‘Academic Search Premier’ and “Business Source Premier’
and maybe ‘Greenfile’. See below:
There are lots of articles in these databases. There are also some specialist
services built into Business Source Premier – like Emerging Markets Monitor
and the World Fact Book, which have statistical information you might like.
To search enter the name of the commodity you are researching – ie tuna –
you’ll get too many hits to look through. To get a smaller, better bunch of
results use combinations of words.
For example: tuna AND trade AND environment.
Some of the articles you’ll find when you search here you can read straight
away. These articles will have a link saying ‘full text’
If an article you’d like to read does not have a ‘full-text’ link you’ll need to
press the
/
button to conduct a search. Examples
provided below: Number 1 has no full text, Number 2 does.
When you press the
/
link and there is full text
available, results should look like this. Press ‘go’ to retrieve.
Symbols for Database Searching:
An asterisk (*) – can be used to finish a word in a variety of ways.
Eg: cultur* = culture, cultures, cultural, etc
Quotation Marks (“ ..”) – can be used to search for a phrase
Eg; “global warming” searches for these words next to eachother
EBSCO will also let you refine you search by subject headings it suggests for
you. These are found on the left of screen after you’ve done a search:
Statistical Databases:
Aside from World Fact Book, and Emerging Markets Monitor, there are other
specialist databases of stats you can access through the library. The two main
ones are OECD Ilibrary and World Bank E-library
OECD I-library – the OECD is a group of only 30 countries, but the database
holds information about more than just those 30. It can be a great place to
look up commodities, but you can search for countries and commodities at the
same time also: (See below)
The World Bank / World Bank E-library
The World Bank website is easy to use and the UTS owned database, the World
Bank E-library, whilst a bit harder to use, advances on the website with extra
reports. Looking up countries works well on the World Bank website, and
World Bank Website – Search for Africa Agriculture (90000 hits)
World bank e-library – Search for Africa Agriculture (2000 hits – but
additional to the website)
Stats on The Web:
Sometimes you might have very specialist statistics you need, that you can’t
easily find in a stats database through the library. This could be because the
information requires putting together two different types of statistics or
because the industry or country you are searching isn’t covered well enough in
these multi purpose databases. For example– like the amount of females in the
cocoa growing workforce in Ghana
For these problems its a good idea to try a Google Search for statistics, but
remember to look for .gov or .org in the website url’s as these are official. You
can even make google search for these urls – see below:
Another option is going to the World Bank website and selecting a country
then highlights, it can take you to the home countries governmental services.
News and Media Databases:
Newspapers – Newsbank or Factiva
These are both good Newspaper databases, and carry information from
Newspapers from Australia and overseas.
Both let you choose newspapers by subject area or even country and lets you
search for news articles by keyword. This can be useful to get a range of media
opinions that are outside of the ones you might get here in Australia.