The following two journal issues are highly recommended by Professor Ken Topping. Full text is free, but requires first filling out a brief sign-up form and then logging in with a password sent to your e-mail address.
Searching Google for Local Government Documents
You can search government documents from California specifically using Google Advanced
Search. Cut and paste the URL of the site you want to search into the field for Search within a site or domain:.
Do a little more exploring in Google Advanced Search, and you'll see you can also limit your results by certain file types (including PDFs) and date ranges. To customize your date range, you must first perform a search, and then, in the left panel choose More search tools and then Custom range....
----------------------------------
A straightforward way to achieve this same filter is to include the "site" command in your search, you limit your search to a particular site or range of sites. For example:
site:.gov (searches all government websites)
site:.ca.gov (searches the California state government and many California county governments)
site:.ca.us (searches many California city websites)
There are exceptions to these rules for counties and cities. Your safest bet is to search site:.gov and include the name of the city in the search as well as your topic keywords.
SAGE publishes over 460 journals in a variety of disciplines including Business, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Science, Technology and Medicine. Sage Journals Online is the database that provides online access to these publications. To view list of journal titles, at logon screen click on BROWSE.
All databases listed here should give you some degree of success searching the phrases hazard mitigation, emergency management, or disaster planning. I have attempted to order them ranked by a rough combination of most/best quality results. Most of these databases have dashboard features that allow you to refine your search for fewer results and/or higher quality (including scholarly) articles.
This is an extensive database covering the humanities and social sciences. Good for current events on architectural topics from general-interest publications and newspapers. Some full-text.
ABI/INFORM provides in-depth coverage of business issues, management techniques, competitive information, and a variety of other topics. More than half of the articles are available in full-text or full-image.
Indexes and abstracts articles in the fields of sociology, anthropology, criminology, demography, educaton, law and penology, race relations, social psychology, and urban studies.