Research Guides: American politics & government: Planning &amp; urban affairs (SPIA)

What'a here

This subject guide for urban and environmental policy and planning identifies principal resources for most research in the field at Virginia Tech.

Resources listed on this landing page are grouped into Essential databases for accessing scholarly literature in the field; Background information sources; Contact information for the subject librarian; and tabs identifying Additional information.

Parts of this guide are also available in Bruce Pencek's other subject guides: Data sources for social research; News/journalism/streaming media; Advice for searching/citing/engaging scholarly literatures; and Accessing VT Library resources from off campus.

Essential: most literature-searching will start here

Urban Studies Abstracts from EBSCOhost
Indexes citations and abstracts of journal articles on all aspects of urban studies, 1973-present. Use GetVText link to get to full-text articles online or to order via ILLiad.
ULI Development Case Studies
ULI Case Studies showcase innovative approaches and best practices in real estate and urban development. Each case study provides detailed information about the ideas, plans, performance, and lessons learned for an exemplary and often award-winning development project. Each also includes project facts, timelines, financial data, site plans, and photos. You must sign in with the library's member login and password access all ULI case studies and briefs from 1994 to present; contact the VT Ask a Librarian service for the password.

HUD User
Managed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's Office of Policy Development and Research (PD&R), HUD User hosts research, publications, and data sets in housing, community development, and more.

Policy Commons from Coherent Digital
Policy Commons is a global portal to "gray literature" -- research publications such as reports, briefs, analyses, working papers, and datasets done to academic standards but not peer-reviewed -- produced by university research centers, "think tanks," consultancies, government agencies, inter- and non-governmental agencies, advocacy and interest groups, and more. Often problem-centered and solution-oriented, these publications can fill the gap between journalism and traditional scholarly publications.
- Includes a module of reports and such specifically from the 500 largest cities in North America.
Public Administration Abstracts from EBSCOhost
Public Administration Abstracts indexes citations and abstracts of articles from public administration journals. 1974-present.
Environment Complete from EBSCOhost
Environment Complete indexes citations, abstracts, and full-text articles from journals, conference proceedings, and books on the agricultural, biological, social science, and technological aspects of the environment. Full text available in HTML and PDF. The database allows limiting to peer-reviewed journals. 1888-present.

Environment Complete contains more than 1,957,000 records from more than 1,700 domestic and international titles going back to the 1940s (including 1,125 active core titles) as well as more than 120 monographs. The database also contains full text for more than 680 journals, including many of the most used journals in the discipline, such as Environment (back to 1975), Ecologist, Conservation Biology, etc. Additionally, Environment Complete provides full text for 120 monographs, such as Encyclopedia of World Environmental History (3 volumes), Advances in Water Treatment & Environmental Management, etc.
CAB Abstracts from CABI
CAB Abstracts indexes citations and abstracts from journals, books, reports, handbooks, conference proceedings, field notes, and theses in agriculture, life sciences, natural resources, veterinary sciences, applied economics, nutrition, tourism, and the environment. Includes the CAB Abstracts Archive. Some full text available as PDFs. 1910s-present.
ProQuest One Business
Expanding on the former ABI/Inform, ProQuest One Business is an important source for scholarship and the trade press about management of public and nonprofit organizations, organization theory, organization behavior, and other areas where social science intersects business. ProQuest One Business indexes citations, abstracts, and full text news articles, market, industry reports, country reports, downloadable data sets, dissertations, business cases, working papers, annual reports from North American companies, and company profiles and histories. You can limit searches to peer-reviewed journals. Full text provided in HTML and PDF. 1971-present.

ProQuest developed a new business subject thesaurus as well as a new corporation thesaurus for ProQuest One Business. All documents included in this collection were reindexed, using these new thesauri. In addition, all company, industry and country reports were reindexed allowing you to limit your search to specific content that must appear in the reports like e.g. a SWOT analysis or a financial forecast. This makes it significantly easier to get more precise and relevant results.

For several thousand companies ProQuest One Business offers special portal pages - so called Company Overviews - and each of these pages provides you with direct access to different types of material for the respective company:

Company Overview
Recent News from Major Publications
Company Reports (grouped by type of information)
All Content for this Company (a bibliometric graph)
Scholarly Journal Articles
Magazines and Trade Journal Articles
Related Companies in this Industry

Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals from EBSCOhost
Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals indexes citations, abstracts, and full-text articles in architecture and design from American and international scholarly and trade journals, popular magazines, and publications of professional organizations. In addition, this database also provides citation records for architects' obituaries. Full text, when available, is in PDF and HTML. 1800s-present.
Architecture, Art & Design databases from ProQuest
This database indexes citations and abstracts for journal articles, books, and dissertations (in full text PDFs) across multiple architecture, art, and design databases on the ProQuest platform. Use the Databases link at the top of the screen to change which databases are searched. You can limit to peer-reviewed sources.

Find background in urban affairs and planning

Routledge Handbook of Planning Research Methods by Silva, Elisabete A. Healey, Patsy Harris, Neil
Call Number: HT165.5 -- .R688 2015eb

ISBN: 9781317917038

Publication Date: 2014
Handbook of Local and Regional Development by Pike, Andy; Rodriguez-Pose, Andres; Tomaney, John
Call Number: HD82 .H27525 2010

ISBN: 9780203842393

Publication Date: 2010
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (2d ed) by James D. Wright, ed.
ISBN: 9780080970868

Publication Date: 2015

Comprises over 3,900 articles, commissioned by 71 section editors, and includes 90,000 bibliographic references as well as comprehensive name and subject indexes; more than 80 percent of the chapters are new or updated since the original text. Both its format and integrated chapters encourage discovery and map contexts and connections within the social and behavioral sciences. Some experts prefer the first edition (2001).

Gale Ebooks
Gale Ebooks is a collection of searchable ebook reference works. You can search within a particular work or across the entire collection. Individual articles from these sources are presented in HTML and PDF. Illustrations, photos, maps, and multimedia content is often included.
SAGE Research Methods Online
Allows you to explore the concepts and mechanics of social research to design research projects, understand particular methods or identify a new method, conduct research, and write up your findings. With its focus on methodology rather than disciplines and sophisticated search options, SRMO can be used across the social sciences, health sciences, and more. Incorporates full-text content from over 720 books, dictionaries, encyclopedias, handbooks, and articles. SRMO incorporates specially commissioned instructional materials illustrating the application of particular methodologies:
- videos,
- sample cases,
- practice datasets.
The Methods Map is an exciting and innovative visualization tool that can be used to discover relationships between methods, to discover new methods and to find content related to them. Underpinning the Methods Map is a new taxonomy of social science research methods, developed by SAGE, and containing over 1,400 unique terms.

The Methods Lists are lists of content within the product that our users have selected and want to share through this product. You can create your own lists, either for private use, or to share with others on the site.

The Little Green Books are our famous series, Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences. This entire series is available on SAGE Research Methods, with additional tools across the site to filter your search on just these titles.