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Management

Research Strategy

Building a Business Research Strategy

This guide is designed to help you with the "Online Library Activity Assignment"

Task 1: Identify Your Topic

Part A. Brainstorming Keywords
Brainstorming keywords is about broadening and narrowing your search and finding related concepts.  If you are having trouble starting, follow these steps:

Write down your topic as a question: Are there consumer trends affecting sales in the restaurant industry?
Pull out the main concepts: consumer trends, sales, restaurant industry
Brainstorm broader, narrower, and related terms for each concept:
     Consumer Trends: demographics (broader), millennials (narrower), customers (related)
     Sales: revenue (related), profits (related)
     Restaurant industry: casual dining (narrower), quick service dining (narrower), food service (broader)
Pick a few terms that seem like a good place to start and put them into a search string:
trends AND sales AND "casual dining"

Pro tip: Write down your search strings as you try them and include a few notes about what worked and what didn't.  If you quit researching and come back a few days later you won't reuse searches that didn't work.

Part B. Searching a Multidisciplinary Database
Academic Search Premier, ProQuest Central, and JSTOR are multidisciplinary databases.  This means they include articles from lots of subject areas such as education, business, social sciences, etc.

If you want a more direct comparison of using a multidisciplinary database versus a subject database use Business Source Premier in Task 2.  Notice how the interface does not change?

Task 2: Searching in Databases

Steps 1 - 4. Selecting a Subject Database
This assignment asks you to use a research database.  The chart below helps you understand the differences between subject databases and other resource options:

Diagram of when to choose a subject database

Many business databases (Mergent Intellect, S&P netAdvantage, Valueline, etc.) do not function the same way traditional article databases do.  For this assignment, you will likely want to use Business Source Premier, ABI/INFORM Collection, or Emerald Insight.

Step 6. Finding Relevant Articles
If you are having trouble locating the article title or journal title, use the "cite" function within the database (usually on the right side of the page in the article record.)  The article title will be immediately after the date.  The journal title will be immediately after the article title.  If the resource does not follow this format it may not be a scholarly journal article.

EXAMPLE:
Sunhee (Sunny) Seo, & Lee, H. (2017). What makes restaurateurs adopt healthy restaurant initiatives?
 British Food Journal, 119(12), 2583-2596. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/BFJ-06-2016-0285
Article Title: What makes restaurateurs adopt health restaurant initiatives
Journal Title: British Food Journal

Task 3: Using an Article's Reference List

Steps 1 - 3. Tips and Tricks for Expanding Your Research
If you can find even one useful article this can usually lead you to more.

A reference list (also called bibliography, works cited, references, or endnotes) is a collection of the sources referenced in the article.  Keep in mind:

  • Not every source in the references of an article will be an article.
  • Every source in the references was published before the article was published, this means the sources will all be older.
  • The library may not have access to every source in an article's reference list.  When this happens you may need Interlibrary Loan.

A "Cited by" list is a list of the articles that have cited the article you are using.  In other words, the article you are using appears in the reference list for another article.  Keep in mind:

  • Not every source in the cited by list of an article will be an article.
  • Every source in the cited by list was published after the article was published, this means the sources will all be newer.
  • The library may not have access to every source in an article's cited by list.  When this happens you may need Interlibrary Loan

Citing Journal Articles in APA 7th Edition