University Library licenses provide access to many literature databases that index a variety of scholarly materials (e.g., journal articles, book chapters, meeting proceedings, theses and dissertations, etc., depending on the database) for our UIUC student, faculty, and staff as well as local users in any of our libraries.
Some literature databases are subject-focused, some are multidisciplinary. The following are several that may be of interest for Urban & Regional Planning scholarship. Just HOVER over the database name to see a popup box with a description of what it is and what it covers.
For access to a complete list, see our A-Z List of Databases.
Planning Databases
- Academic Search Ultimate This link opens in a new window
Alternate version: Academic Search Ultimate in the classic EBSCO user interface (best for exporting more than 50 results or combining saved searches). A scholarly, multidisciplinary database providing indexing and abstracts for over 10,000 publications, including monographs, reports, conference proceedings, and others. Also includes full-text access to over 5,000 journals. Offers coverage of many areas of academic study including: archaeology, area studies, astronomy, biology, chemistry, civil engineering, electrical engineering, ethnic & multicultural studies, food science & technology, general science, geography, geology, law, mathematics, mechanical engineering, music, physics, psychology, religion & theology, women's studies, and other fields.
- America: History & Life with Full Text This link opens in a new window
Alternate version: America: History & Life with Full Text in the classic EBSCO user interface (best for exporting more than 50 results or combining saved searches). Index of literature covering the history and culture of the United States and Canada, from prehistory to the present. The database indexes journals from 1964 to present and includes citations and links to book and media reviews.
- Artstor This link opens in a new windowThe Artstor Digital Library is a nonprofit resource that provides over 2 million digital images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and sciences with an accessible suite of software tools for teaching and research. Inc. approx. 5000 images from Fdn. of Landscape Studies. These images provide an overview of landscape studies, encompassing all cultural landscapes, including gardens, parks, cities, suburbs, rural areas, and the humanized wilderness. Users can search, view, download and organize images. Users can search, view, download and organize images.
- Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals This link opens in a new window
Alternate version: Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals in the classic EBSCO user interface (best for exporting more than 50 results or combining saved searches). Comprehensive listing of journal articles on architecture and design, including the history and practice of architecture, landscape architecture, city planning, historic preservation, and interior design and decoration. The American and international journals indexed include not only scholarly and popular periodical literature, but also publications of professional associations, American state and regional periodicals, and the major serials on architecture and design of Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Australia. Coverage is mainly from 1934 to the present, with selective coverage back to 1741.
- Best Practices Database from UN-HABITATThis searchable database from UN-HABITAT contains proven solutions to common social, economic, and environmental problems of an urbanizing and globalizing world. This database is a powerful tool for analyzing current trends and emerging issues.
- Business Source Ultimate This link opens in a new window
Alternate version: Business Source Ultimate in the classic EBSCO user interface (best for exporting more than 50 results or combining saved searches). Provides bibliographic and full text content, including indexing and abstracts for scholarly business journals back as far as 1886 and full text journal articles in all disciplines of business, including marketing, management, MIS, POM, accounting, finance and economics. The database full text content includes financial data, books, monographs, major reference works, book digests, conference proceedings, case studies, investment research reports, industry reports, market research reports, country reports, company profiles, SWOT analyses and more.
- Engineering Village This link opens in a new windowEngineering Village is “the information discovery platform for the engineering community.” It includes access to several major literature databases that provide access to scholarly journals, trade publications, patents, government reports, reference books, conference proceedings, and more. Databases included in Engineering Village — Compendex, Inspec, GEOBASE, GeoRef, EP Patents, U.S. Patents, and NTIS. Ei Compendex covers over 20 million records across 190 engineering disciplines. GEOBASE contains 3+ million earth abstracts allowing users to “review geographical structures, relation to natural resources, and links to local resources including transportation and regional planning.” NTIS contains nearly 3 million bibliographic records for government research reports and more in over 350 subject areas.
- Forest Service Enterprise Data This link opens in a new windowMaintained by the US Forest Service this open access database is an index to publications on parks, park services and land use issues and includes maps as well as text based resources.
- GEOBASE This link opens in a new windowIncludes citations and abstracts for over 2,000 research-oriented periodicals in development studies, the Earth sciences, ecology, geology, geomechanics, human geography, and oceanography. Includes geological structure and relation to natural resources with links to resources management, transport, and regional and urban planning. Covers 1980 - present. One of several databases available from the Engineering Village platform. Includes 7 subsets: Ecological Abstracts, Geographical Abstracts – Physical Geography, Geographical Abstracts – Human Geography, Geological Abstracts, Geomechanics Abstracts, International Development Abstracts, and Oceanographic Literature Review.
- GeoRef This link opens in a new windowProduced by the American Geosciences Institute, GeoRef contains citations and abstracts to more than 3,500 journals in 40 languages as well as new books, maps, conference papers, reports and theses. Covers the geology of North America from 1669 to the present and the geology of the rest of the world from 1933 to the present. The database includes references to all publications of the U.S. Geological Survey. Masters' theses and doctoral dissertations from US and Canadian universities are also covered. Major areas of coverage include areal geology, economic geology, engineering geology, environmental geology, extraterrestrial geology, geochemistry, geochronology, geophysics, hydrogeology and hydrology, marine geology and oceanography, mathematical geology, mineralogy and crystallography, paleontology, petrology, seismology, stratigraphy, structural geology, surficial geology
- Hospitality & Tourism Index This link opens in a new windowBibliographic database providing access to scholarly research and industry news relating to all areas of hospitality and tourism. Combines the records of three collections: Cornell University's former Hospitality Database, Articles in Hospitality and Tourism collection, and the Lodging, Restaurant & Tourism Index.
- JSTOR This link opens in a new window
This link opens in a new window
Multidisciplinary journal archive provides page images of back issues of the core scholarly journals from the earliest issues to within a few years of current publication. Areas include landscape architecture, urban planning, and public policy and administration. New issues of existing titles and new titles are added approximately on a weekly basis.
- Land Use DatabaseThe Center for Land Use Interpretation's Land Use Database is a catalog of unusual and exemplary places across the USA, highlighted and described by the CLUI. It is an annotation of the landscape as artifact, a product of our economy and society, an altered topography shaped by our individual and collective activities. [CLU]
- NUsearch for Transportation ResearchFrom Northwestern University Transportation Library. Indexes scholarly articles, conference proceedings, trade publications, and other material on transportation and law enforcement topics.
- OECD iLibraryThe online library of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) provides access to articles, ebooks, book chapters, tables and graphs, working papers, and more published by the International Energy Agency (IEA), the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA), the OECD Development Centre, PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), and the International Transport Forum (ITF).
- PAIS Index This link opens in a new windowBibliographic database with abstracts covering the full range of political, social, and public policy issues. Indexes selected journal articles, statistical directories grey literature, conference papers, web content, publications from government and nongovernmental organizations, Local, regional, national, international in scope. Covers 1915 – present.
- Periodicals Archive Online This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
An electronic index to millions of articles published in thousands of scholarly and popular periodicals in the arts, humanities and social sciences since 1770. PCI provides context for each entry by displaying it within the table of contents from the original source journal. The scope is worldwide and includes journals in English, German, Italian, French, Spanish and other Western languages. Indexes journals in city planning and urban studies as well as landscape architecture and the environment - ProQuest Statistical Insight (Statistical Universe) This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Covers federal, state, and international statistics from a variety of sources. Includes housing, census, income statistics and more. Using one common interface, but it takes you directly to the data you need. Instead of relying on the limited capabilities of free-text searching, which is particularly ineffective with the tabular format of statistical data, or wading through large text documents only to find it does NOT have the statistics you need, ProQuest Statistical Insight allows you to go straight to the tables, or to easily find the right publication with the right key tables. - Research in Progress (RiP) Database This link opens in a new windowThis Transportation Research Board database "contains more than 14,000 current or recently completed transportation research projects, mostly those funded by the modal administrations of the U.S. Department of Transportation, state Departments of Transportation (DOTs), or by TRB's cooperative research programs."
- Research Needs Statements (RNS) Database This link opens in a new windowContains research needs statements for transportation issues identified by the Transportation Research Board.
- Scopus This link opens in a new windowScopus is the largest abstract and citation database of peer reviewed literature. It indexes nearly 23,000 peer-reviewed journals (including open access journals), trade journals, book serials and non-serials, conference proceedings, and patents. Multi-disciplinary, including landscape architecture, and urban planning. Several discover features, analytical tools, and research metrics enhance your results.
- SimplyAnalytics This link opens in a new windowSimplyAnalytics is a web-based mapping application that lets users quickly create professional-quality thematic maps and reports using demographic, business, and marketing data for the United States.
Log in options: Create your own account or sign in as a guest - SocINDEX with Full Text This link opens in a new window
Alternate version: SocINDEX with Full Text in the classic EBSCO user interface (best for exporting more than 50 results or combining saved searches). SocINDEX with Full Text offers comprehensive coverage of sociology, encompassing all sub-disciplines and closely related areas of study. These include abortion, criminology & criminal justice, demography, ethnic & racial studies, gender studies, marriage & family, political sociology, religion, rural & urban sociology, social development, social psychology, social structure, social work, socio-cultural anthropology, sociological history, sociological research, sociological theory, substance abuse & other addictions, violence and many others.
- Sociological Abstracts This link opens in a new windowAbstracts and indexes the international literature in sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences. The database provides citations from 1952 to the present to journal articles, book reviews, books, book chapters, dissertations, and conference papers. Major areas of coverage include economic development; environmental interactions; evaluation research; family and social welfare; management and complex organizations; mass phenomena and political interactions; policy, planning, forecast and speculation; radical sociology; rural and urban sociology; and studies in violence and power.
- TRB Publications Index This link opens in a new windowThe Transportation Research Board (TRB) Publications Index contains more than 70,000 papers, articles, and reports published by the Transportation Research Board, Highway Research Board, Strategic Highway Research Program, or the Marine Board from 1923 to date.
- TRID (the TRIS and ITRD Database)TRID is an integrated database that combines the records from Transportation Research Board’s Transportation Research Information Services (TRIS) Database and the OECD’s Joint Transport Research Centre’s International Transport Research Documentation (ITRD) Database. TRID provides access to more than one million records of transportation research worldwide covering all modes and disciplines of transportation as well as some trade publications (e.g. Mass Transit).
- UN-Habitat This link opens in a new windowThe United Nations Human Settlements Programme is the United Nations agency for human settlements. It is mandated by the UN General Assembly to promote socially and environmentally sustainable towns and cities with the goal of providing adequate shelter for all. Under the Repository section of the site, find reports and publications on housing, planning and design, slum upgrading, and other urban development issues; urban profiles; video lectures with synopsis, biographies, reading materials; the UN-Habitat Urban Data database for cities and countries around the world; UrbanLex: The Urban Law Database; and more.
- Urban Studies Abstracts This link opens in a new window
Alternate version: Urban Studies Abstracts in the classic EBSCO user interface (best for exporting more than 50 results or combining saved searches). Urban Studies Abstracts includes bibliographic records covering essential areas related to urban studies, including urban affairs, community development, urban history, and other areas of key relevance to the discipline. Records are selected from many of the top titles within the discipline, including Journal of Urban Affairs, Urban Studies, and Canadian Journal of Urban Research.
- Web of Science (All Databases Search) This link opens in a new windowEasily search across all subscribed Web of Science databases simultaneously using a common set of search fields for the most comprehensive results. Web of Science indexes core journal articles, conference proceedings, data sets, and other resources in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities.
Newspapers
- Access World News This link opens in a new windowAccess World News from NewsBank provides full-text information and perspectives from over 600 U.S. and over 700 international sources, each with its own distinctive focus offering diverse viewpoints on local, regional and world issues. Date coverage varies with individual newspaper
- Newspaper Source Plus This link opens in a new window
Identifies articles in regional U.S. newspapers, international newspapers, newswires and newspaper columns, as well as TV and radio news transcripts. Provides cover-to-cover full text for over 20 national (U.S.) and international newspapers, including USA Today, The Christian Science Monitor, The Washington Post, The Times (London), The Toronto Star, etc. Also contains selected full text from more than 200 regional (U.S.) newspapers, including The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The Detroit Free Press, The Miami Herald, The New York Daily News, The San Jose Mercury News, etc. In addition, full text television & radio news transcripts are provided from CBS News, FOX News, NPR, etc.
- Nexis Uni This link opens in a new windowFeatures more than 15,000 news, business and legal sources, including U.S. Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1790. Includes current news, business information, company directories, federal and state laws, regulations, legal cases, and more.