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English 4996: Guide to Resources: Writing Climate Change

Resources to support writing about climate fiction, "cli-fi", and climate change in literature and in the history of science.

Research & Criticism

To find books on a subject, you can do a keyword search in Discover@MU. Once you have results on the screen, you can use the limits in the left sidebar to focus on just books/ebooks and use the drop-down menus in the search box to search just within the title or subject headings. You can also expand your search to all the academic libraries in Missouri by using the MOBIUS catalog, which you can expand to include Colorado libraries by clicking on the Prospector link. You can have materials from either catalog delivered to any of the MU libraries for pick-up.

Note that neither of these searches the full text of books, just a brief description. Google Book Search allows you to search within books that Google has digitized and in most cases preview a few pages. Usually a link in the left sidebar will then help you find the physical book in a library.

Finding Book Reviews

It can take several years for criticism to be published, so scholarship on very recent works may not appear in the research databases. Book reviews or blog posts may be the main responses to a work for the first few years.

Book reviews may be found in most of the databases listed. Look for the advanced search feature and the option to limit by document type to review or book review.

A Word on Words

Database are very literal, so pay attention to the words you use to search. For example "clifi" probably won't retrieve "cli-fi". That hyphen makes all the difference!

Here are some of the subject headings/descriptors that may be helpful:

climate and civilization
climatic changes--fiction
climatic changes in literature
climatic factors
climatology
climatology in literature
ecocriticism
ecofiction--history and criticism
ecology in literature
environmental disasters
environmental policy in literature
environmental protection in literature
environmentalism in literature
global warming--fiction
human ecology
nature--effect of human beings on