QUESTION: mining

question / pregunta: 

Social responsability of mineral industries of Latin america.

Answers


Answer posted by:
jim miller

If you do not have ready access to a large public or academic library that has onsite access to major databases such as Academic Source Premier (or Complete), Business Source (Premier or Complete), or Proquest journals databases, you might still get very worthwhile results from a Google search, by limiting to site:edu, site:ac.uk, or even site:edu.au. Google Scholar will be frustrating to use unless you have a current student/staff proxy login to a major academic Library, because most of those results are from academic journals that require expensive subscriptions or even more expensive "pay per article" options. Site:edu may get you some quite helpful and recent unpublished research reports from academic departments.

Google gets "about 938 results" for: "Social responsibility" "mineral industries" "Latin america" site:edu - which turns out to be only 146 unique hits, once you page to the end. The search: "Social responsibility" "mineral industries" brazil* site:edu gets "about 1770...", which turns out to be 65; "social responsibility" "mineral industries" argentin* site:edu gets "897"(73); "social responsibility" "mineral industries" chile* site:edu gets "861" (63), etc.

Compare Business Source Complete, which defaults to a search of author, article title, journal title, abstract, and subject, and gets 17 articles for the search: (mineral* or mines) and industr* and social* and responsib* and ("south america*" or brazil* or argentin* or chile* or venezuela* or paraguay* or uruguay*). Even in their advanced search, with the 3 small looking boxes, you can put that entire search all into one box (it scrolls to take maybe 240 characters). You can click "Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals" either before or after you do the search, and that drops the list to 7 academic articles.

Academic Source Premier gets only 10 articles (5 scholarly/peer reviewed) for that same search; but there may be some that Business Source does NOT have - because Academic Search covers ALL subjects, including ones such as engineering, religion, art, etc. - whereas Business Source focuses more on just business and related fields. If you do get access to these subscription databases - either onsite at a public university or college, or via student/staff remote login - it's wise to take advantage of their "proximity search" in their full text search. In Business Source Complete, if I "select a field" TX-All text, the search: mineral* n40 social* n40 responsib* n40 brazil* gets 3 articles (1 scholarly), where the words are within 40 words of each other, including vertical distance in the text.

You can also try broader searches (maybe leave out "responsib*" and just look for "social" - to get social unrest, social policies, and other things that may touch on social responsibility - or at least imply a connection to it. Note for example, JSTOR's different proximity search: "minerals social latin america"~40, gets 13 articles here at University of Maryland (other schools have different JSTOR "packages" and your results may vary quite a bit). There are many other databases that may help. Proquest's "Dissertations & Theses Full text" would be essential to search if you are planning to do even Master's level research on this. But for a college/university class project or personal interest search, those 2 Ebsco databases would be a quite reasonable way to start your search.