Business & Economics
Conducting a Successful Literature Search
To research your topic in more detail, you will need to have access to the most indepth and up-to-date information. Such information can be found in scholarly journal
articles; and you will need to use a specialist bibliographic database to track these
articles down. This guide highlights the most effective way to do this...
Ingredients
A bibliographic database
Swansea University username and password
A search strategy
A Thesaurus
Boolean Operators
The Phrase Search
The Truncation Symbol
The Wildcard Symbol
Also: plenty of time, a degree of patience and soupcon of tenacity
Directions
Choosing a bibliographic database
Bibliographic databases are online indexes of journal articles which you can search
by subject, title or author. iFind Research http://ifindresearch.swan.ac.uk/ details the
best databases for your subject. From the subject menu select Business,
Economics & Management, & then Business & Management, use the button to
learn more about each resource.
EBSCO Business Source Complete indexes the articles from over 8,000 journals
of which more than 2,300 are full text scholarly journals covering business,
management, economics, banking, finance and accounting.
FAME (Financial Analysis Made Easy) provides access to company reports for all
UK and Irish companies in UK and Ireland over the last 10 years.
Mintel Oxygen use this to locate market research reports covering food, drink,
leisure, e-commerce and technology.
Mintel Global Markets Navigator use this to locate market research data for all
regions, countries, industries, and markets
Proquest Business Collection provides access to six key databases: ABI Inform
Complete, Accounting and Tax, Banking Information Source, International
Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS), Proquest Asian Business and
Reference, and Proquest Entrepreneurship.
Swansea University username and password (to enable access)
Your Username is your six digit student number e.g.123456. Your Password is your
usual password.
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Business & Economics
A Search Strategy

Think about your research topic and clarify your ideas

Think about geographical and time limits
e.g. Global/Europe/UK/Wales? ; 20th century/last decade/last month?
 Divide your topic into concepts.
For example if your research topic was “encouragement of entrepreneurship in a
global economy” your concepts would be:
Concept 1
Encouragement
Concept 2
Entrepreneurship
Concept 3
Global economy
For each concept think of broader and narrower terms, synonyms and alternative
spellings:
Concept 1
Concept 2
Concept 3
Mentoring; development; training
Innovation; venture; risk taking; new business enterprises
International trade/markets/business; globalisation/globalization
A Thesaurus
Some databases (such as EBSCO) have an in-built thesaurus; it is always a good
idea to make use of it to ensure you have identified all the best terms or descriptors
for your topic.
Boolean Operators
The Boolean operators AND, OR & NOT will help you to perform more effective
searches
To narrow your search results use AND
the database will only find results which contain all your search terms/phrases
e.g. mentoring AND entrepreneurship AND global economy
To broaden your search results use OR
the database will find results which contain either one or more of your search terms
e.g. entrepreneurship OR innovation OR venture
To exclude a term from your search use NOT
the database will exclude results containing the second term
e.g. tax NOT income
The Phrase Search
To search for a phrase, place it in inverted commas (“ “) e.g. “global economy”
Using a phrase search is important when your search term includes any incidental
words that databases tend to dismiss; these include as a, the, of etc. For example,
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Business & Economics
you would need to use a phrase search if you were searching for information on the
Bank of England.
The Truncation Symbol *
To pick up all derivatives of a word, many databases use a truncation symbol, which
is usually the asterisk *
By entering tax* the database will search for tax, taxes, taxation
Another example is employ* which retrieves employers, employees, employment
The Wildcard Symbol ?
To represent one or more characters in the middle of a word, many databases use a
wildcard symbol, which is usually the question mark ?
By entering wom?n the database will find woman and women
As many of the databases we use are created in the USA, using the wildcard symbol
will help you to circumvent American spellings and terminology, e.g.
organi?ation will find organization and organisation
behavio?r will find behavior and behaviour
labo?r will find labor and labour
Reality check!
Remember bibliographic databases index a large proportion of the journal literature
within a specific subject area. However, please note the library will not
subscribe to everything – if you are unable to gain access to the article/s you
require you have two options:

Acquiring the item from another library via the Document Supply Service, for
more details go to http://www.swansea.ac.uk/iss/libraries/documentsupplyservices/

Becoming a member of one of our reciprocal borrowing schemes, which
entitle you to personally borrow items from other University libraries. For more details
go to http://www.swansea.ac.uk/iss/libraries/visitorsinformation/
By using this guide, you will have the right ingredients to generate many successful
searches. However, if you have any problems, please contact us at
buslib@swan.ac.uk or visit our library support pages via Blackboard.
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