Library: BS 456 Business Policy: Guide

Other Useful Subject Guides

Remember!

You can always go to the library for help. Pop in at the reference desk, send an email to library@bakeru.edu, or schedule an appointment! We are here for you and always happy to help.

Best Databases

ABI/INFORM Collection This link opens in a new window
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ABI/Inform is the best place to see what is being said about the company you're researching. Part of your project will be to talk about the perception of your company and using ABI/Inform will be the place to go for the most reliable sources.
Most scholarly and comprehensive way to explore and understand business research topics. Searches three ABI-INFORM databases: Dateline, Global, and Trade and Industry. Covers business and economic conditions, corporate strategies, management techniques, as well as competitive and product information. Its international coverage gives researchers a complete picture of companies and business trends around the world. Search nearly 8,000 publications worldwide, almost 80% available in full text. The database contains complete runs of key business and management journals, providing a unique historical perspective from 1923-present. Full text coverage of the Wall Street Journal is also included from 1984-present.
Company Dossier (NexisUni) This link opens in a new window
This link will bring you to NexisUni, which hosts Company Dossier. At the top of the page, click on the Menu button and then click 'Company Dossier' from the dropdown. This database gives you a profile for any company that you can look up, providing all of the information you need for your company profile.
Gale Business: Insights This link opens in a new window
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Gale provides both company and industry information; it's a useful database for seeing news about your company, your company's biggest competitors, and how it fits into its industry as a whole. Gale also provides company profiles, if you find the interface better than Company Dossier's.
This innovative resource includes company profiles (with corporate parent/sibling relationships), industry rankings, products and brands, investment reports, industry statistics, financial ratios, case studies, and corporate chronologies and history. Coverage is from 1980-present.

General Research Steps

Basic Search

Use broad search terms on Google or a database to get an idea of what is out there. At this point you're not trying to secure any sources, you're just trying to learn. So, it's okay to get information to less formal sources as long as you can back up the information you find later with scholarly ones.

Advanced Search

Now we're only using databases. We have figured out what keywords we want to use in the databases to find what we need. You can engage the Boolean operators to help refine your results.

Filtering Results

Often even with specific key words, you can still get thousands of results. And who wants to scroll through thousands of results? You can use the filtering options (usually on the left side of the web page) to get those numbers down. Some options are filtering by publication year, full-text availability, and by author.

Choosing Articles

Now start choosing which articles you think will best support your argument. Remember: you cannot save EBSCO articles by their link; you have to either download the PDF or make a free EBSCO account and the save the article to a folder. Make sure that the articles you're choosing are ones you have the time to read (or at the very least skim).

Do it all again!

The most important part of doing research is knowing that you'll have to do multiple steps multiple times. Maybe the first database you've tried doesn't have what you want, so you need to go to a new one. Maybe you tried a filtering option that ended up giving you too few results. Or you've found some articles that you thought would be useful but turns out they're not, or maybe they're too difficult to read. Never be afraid to toss out an article that's not working for you and find a new one.

Research Tips

Use the Subjects

The best way to get the most accurate results (and take down the number of results you get) is to search by subject, rather then by keyword. When you do a basic search on a database, it will pull up anything that has the word you searched anywhere. When you do a subject search, the database will only pull up results that are tagged as being specifically about whatever work you searched.

Use like terms

Sometimes the words we search don't pull up the results expect. It's always good to try synonyms or words that are similar to the terms we originally search to see if we can find better results.

Try different databases

Every database has its own purview of topics is tries to cover. Some try to be more general and have a little bit of everything and other try to have a lot about very specific subjects. If one database isn't pulling up the results you want or expect, try a different on.