Research Hacked: Business Topics

This guide introduces how to get started researching business disciplines such as Accounting, Management, Marketing, Transportation & Logistics, Economics, Business Law, Entrepreneurship, and International Business.

Business research can provide information on a wide range of topics, companies, industries, and more! When researching in business disciplines you may need to find background information on a company, industry reports, market research reports, demographic data about a region or consumer group, legal documents, trade journals, or scholarly journals. Industry jargon can make researching difficult, but many library search tools exist to help you find exactly what you need!

Discipline Specific

Power Search Tools

Exact Phrase

Add Quotation Marks to search for an exact phrase or words in a specific or EXACT order. An exact phrase will return more accurate results because it snaps all of the words together, turning it into a phrase that must be found exactly in that order.

Example: social media marketing vs. “social media marketing”

3 Magic Words - AND, OR, NOT

Filters

Apply filters to limit your search results. Because they limit your results, filters might also be called limiters. The most common and helpful filters to limit your results are:

• Date: Limit to the past 5 years, or a specific date range
• Source Type: Limit to academic/scholarly sources or any other type, such as news or ebooks
• Peer Review: Limit to scholarly sources that have been peer reviewed

Keywords

Create a list of keywords associated with your topic.

What else could it be called (synonyms)? What describes it specifically (hyponyms)? What is it related to broadly (hypernyms)?

Topics can be narrowed or broadened depending on the use of search terms.

General: management styles

Narrower: delegative management style

Broader: management