Welcome! This guide will serve as a starting point for Shippensburg University students wishing to conduct research on various aspects of the national debate over animal rights and animal welfare. You will find sources that introduce you to your topic and keep you up-to-date with links to news articles, research websites, journal articles, and research reports concerning animal rights and animal welfare.
You will also find selected key publications, books & e-books, research organizations and advocacy groups, data sources and links to general and specialized databases for further research.
Search Terms
Main Term(s): animal rights, animal welfare Related Terms: animal experimentation, animal rights movement, vegetarianism, vegan Broader Terms: environmentalism, conservation, animals - law & legislation, ethics Narrower Terms: laboratory animals, primates, pets
Raising awareness of human indifference and cruelty toward animals, The Global Guide to Animal Protection includes more than 180 introductory articles that survey the extent of worldwide human exploitation of animals from a variety of perspectives.
The debate over the use of nonhuman animals in experimental research has gone on for centuries, and it continues as vigorously today as it ever has. In fact, in the last decade, the controversy has intensified, making animal testing a topic at the highest level of debate of any socioscientific issue in the United States.
Extensively revised and updated, this new edition explores the basis for current perspectives on animal rights by addressing the relationship between humans and animals from scientific, philosophical, legal, and religious points of view.
In this fresh and comprehensive introduction to animal ethics, Lori Gruen weaves together poignant and provocative case studies with discussions of ethical theory, urging readers to engage critically and empathetically reflect on our treatment of other animals. In clear and accessible language, Gruen provides a survey of the issues central to human-animal relations and a reasoned new perspective on current key debates in the field.
This book examines the contents, influence, and potential of a personal selection of modern books published over the last fifty years that have been relevant to improving welfare.
This collection pairs cogently argued essays by leading philosophers with opposing views on fault-line public concerns. Chapters six and seven cover animal rights.
David Fraser places modern-day welfare issues within their historical framework by tracing the evolving ideas that led to current thinking. He also highlights some intriguing issues relating to the contradiction inherent in the term 'animal welfare science' and the practical problem of how to assess emotional states in animals.
While having a strong role in advocacy, the AVMA is also a research organization. The Resources & Tools section includes links to literature reviews, reference guides, and other resources. You can also use the powerful search tool that can filtered in many ways.
Consult the Advocacy section for details on the AVMA's extensive work on national and state governmental laws and regulations concerning animal welfare.
A very active advocacy organization. Site includes extensive information on animal welfare issues as well as the Compassion Index, a tool to track legislation and to advocate for positions.
This is the major trade association for red meat and turkey producers. The website contains a significant amount of information related to animal welfare and health.
Data Sources
Data Sources
Currently, there is no highly reliable source for animal abuse statistics in the United States. As of January 2016, the FBI has added acts of animal cruelty to its crime reporting system, National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). It will take year until this data becomes very useful.
This library database serves as a search engine to search most library databases at the same time, including magazine and journal databases, e-book collections, and the library catalog. News databases are not included in a comprehensive way. Supplement this with direct searching of ProQuest Newstand and Lexis Nexis Academic. Search results default to items that the library owns, either in online or print format. Remove the "Available in Library Collection" limiter to retrieve items available through interlibrary loan.
Academic Search Complete is our most important general database. covering all subject areas. It is useful for research in all classes, as it includes 26+ million newspaper, magazine, and journal articles, with 50% of these immediately available in full-text.
Access from on campus or off campus with Ship ID.
Contents indexed in Ship Library Discovery Search.
One of the most comprehensive news databases in the world, ProQuest Global Newstream includes access to over 3000 news sources, including 2,200 newspapers, as well as blogs, podcasts, websites and news wire feeds worldwide.
Development note - alt link use stats: (91 total hits, 33 since 7/2012 -- 10 /2012)
This library database is one of the world's largest full-text databases, including very extensive news, legal, and business information. Along with ProQuest Newstand, it is our primary source of news information.
This scholarly database facillitates searching of the PubMed database for literature about alternative methods to animal testing, as well as other animal welfare issues. Particularly helpful is the links to PubMed citations by category.
Helpful listing of legal articles related to animal rights and animal welfare topics. When you find an article of interest, copy the article title and search the Library Discovery Search for the article.
A very helpful library research guide from the research library at the San Diego Zoo. It is an excellent source to identify useful books and articles related to animal welfare issues - and then look them up on our library site to access them or borrow from another library.
Humanities Source is designed to meet the needs of students, researchers and educators interested in all aspects of the humanities. The collection includes full text for more than 1,400 journals, with citations to over 3.5 million articles, including book reviews. Coverage in Humanities Source includes worldwide content pertaining to literary, scholarly and creative thought.
Environment Complete contains more than 2.4 million records from more than 2,200 domestic and international titles going back to 1888 (including over 1,350 active core titles) as well as more than 190 monographs. The database also contains full text for more than 920 journals.
Library database that covers the most important and controversial issues of the day. Contains the full text of CQ Researcher, a weekly publication. Each issue provides a comprehensive overview and background essay, data tables and graphs, chronology, pro-con starter, and list of major research and advocacy groups. Includes extensive lists of sources and hot-linked footnotes throughout.
CQ Magazine (formerly CQ Weekly) is a weekly publication featuring in-depth articles on issues before Congress, news reports on many different topics under consideration and an extensive weekly tracking of the major bills being debating in Congress, with roll-call votes. The library's coverage includes 1983-2015.
Available on campus and off-campus with your Ship ID and password
Quality Web Sources
High Quality Web Source Finder
Use this search tool to find high quality web sources for your research. You can limit by In-Depth Journalism, Newpaper Topic Guides, Science News, CRS (Congressional Research Service) Reports, and Web Directories. Please Note: Several ads will appear first in the results list.
ProPublica is a freely available website produced by a major online non-profit news organization dedicated to in-depth investigative reporting about current issues in the public interest. ProPublica features two kinds of reporting: Investigations, which include a series of in-depth articles about a topic (often between 15 and 30 articles - major topics range from dozens to 100+ articles). MuckReads are shorter reports featuring investigative journalism from other news agencies. Major areas of interest include, among others: healthcare and the health industry, fracking, censorship, money and politics, and financial and economic issues.
Reveal is a freely available website and the online media platform for the Center for Investigative Journalism, a major online non-profit news organization, founded in 1977, and dedicated to in-depth investigative reporting about current issues in the public interest. They publish series of investigative reports on a topic (typically between 10 and 20). Major areas of coverage include: criminal justice, the environment, guns, health care, labor and employment, national security, religion, surveillance and privacy, and veterans.
The Center for Public Integrity is a freely available website produced by a major online non-profit news organization dedicated to in-depth investigative reporting about current issues in the public interest, with a special focus on accountability and fairness, especially in terms of the role and influence of money. Topics featured include politics and elections, national security business, the environment, juvenile justice and health.
NPR is one of the most important freely-available sources of investigative journalism. It includes excellent topical pages but these are not easily browseable on the website. Use the High Quality Web Source Finder search box to locate the topical pages for your issue.
This very high quality web site, located at Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy and sponsored by leading academic journalism programs, guides journalists and other researchers to find scholarly sources related to many of the most important topics in the news. Whenever the source is not available in full-text, use the discovery layer or library A-Z journal list to get library access to the article or to order it on interlibrary loan.
Newspaper Topic Guides
A number of important national newspapers have topic or issue sections of their website that bring together all the paper's articles on particular topics. The leading example of this is "Times Topics" from the New York Times. Each topic guide/section has a search tool that lets you refine your search.
Unfortunately, these sections are often not easy to browse or locate on the newspaper websites. Use the "High Quality Web Source Finder" search box above to search for your topic. Then choose the Newspaper Topic Guides tab to look for these in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune. If you should hit a pay wall when browsing these newspapers, simply search for articles from any of these three papers using the ProQuest Newstand library database.
Congressional Research Service Reports (CRS Reports)
The Congressional Research Service (CRS) is the public policy research division of Congress. It issues detailed research reports on a very wide range of issues. CRS doesn't maintain its own website, but its reports are available through several organizations and libraries.
Website that attempts to make all CRS reports easily available to the public. The result of a bi-partisan movement to get Congress to pass a bill requiring open access.
The University of North Texas maintains a freely available digital library collection of Congressional Research Service reports, with the goal "to provide integrated, searchable access to many of the full-text CRS reports that have been available at a variety of different web sites since 1990" -- website. Best search tool for finding CRS reports. Update holdings of specific reports through the Federation of American Scientists or through a web search on the name of a report.
This freely available website produced by the Vanderbilt University Libraries provides an alphabetical topical directory to important websites on some 50 current issues. These guide pages typically include sections for these kinds of web resources: Basic Sites, Government, International, News, Statistics, Interest Groups and Research Centers and Other Educational Sites.
Welcome! This guide will serve as a starting point for Shippensburg University students wishing to conduct research on various aspects of the national debate over animal rights and animal welfare. You will find sources that introduce you to your topic and keep you up-to-date with links to news articles, research websites, journal articles, and research reports concerning animal rights and animal welfare.
The Global Guide to Animal Protection by 
The Animal Experimentation Debate: a Reference Handbook by 
Animal Rights: A Reference Handbook by 
Ethics and Animals: an Introduction by 
Understanding Animal Welfare by 
Contemporary Debates in Applied Ethics by 
Understanding Animal Welfare: The Science in its Cultural Context by 
