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Doing Business Research When you need to do research, you often have to do a little poking around before you really know what you want to focus on. When your class came to the library, we began by watching a little movie on Web 2.0. Let's say the movie got you interested in learning more about what is meant by Web 2.0. -- You use the Web everyday. Are there different versions? ; -) One place to start is to use the define feature on Google, which will bring you back a working definition.
The next step
will be to find periodical articles. Academic Search Premier is a very large general database of periodical articles. Business Source Premier is an excellent database specifically for business topics. Here's how to get to and use the full text databases:
Suppose I first found some articles about Web 2.0, and got interested in how businesses are thinking of using mashups. You might remember that a mashup is a Website or Web application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience. When your class came to the library, we looked at Geourl.org, which maps a database of URLs (Internet addresses) to a map of the world. A search in Business Source Premier for articles on this topic could look like this:
Here's the beginning of the results list:
Click on the title of an article to get full information about it. For example, if I thought the title of the first article were interesting, I would click on the title line, and get this:
The whole article follows the abstract. You can print it
out, email it, or save it. Look where it says Newspaper articles are very useful to business research. The library subscribes to a database called Proquest Newspapers that offers full text copies of all the articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, and The Christain Science Monitor. Time coverage is from today's newspapers to several years back. We also have the historical New York Times, which covers 1851-2003.
A search for the use of mashups in business would look like this:
Here's the beginning of the results list:
Let's say I selected
the second article. You click on the title of the article to bring up
the full text -- what they call Document View. And there are buttons
for printing and emailing the article right there. Nifty!!
When your class came to the library, we talked about using Google in the Advanced Search mode, which gives you more options. We watched that movie in class about Web 2.0. Could there be other teaching materials that you could tap into? PowerPoint presentations gather together information on specific topics and can often be very useful to exploring new topics.. In the Advanced Search mode, you can do a Google search and limit your results just to PowerPoints. You can also limit the results to educational institutions. Here's a sample search doing that.
When your class came to the library, we looked at some "deep Web" resources -- databases that are not indexed by Google. One I mentioned in particular is Highwire Press from Stanford. It offers access to a large number of full text articles -- some, not all, are free. Suppose you were doing research at home, forgot your library card number, but, darn it! you needed full text articles on a specialized topic. Go to Highwire Press -- http://www.highwire.stanford.edu Here's a search for information about Web 2.0. Note how I use the quotation marks to keep the word Web next to 2.0.
The library offers about 15,000 electronic books. These books are available to you from any computer anywhere -- if you're off campus you'll need your library card number. To get to the electronic books:
Of course, I looked to see whether Web 2.0 is mentioned in any electronic books. Here's my search:
"Web 2.0" is used in 27 different books. Wow!
You would click on View this eBook to start reading it.
When you write a research paper, you will use a style guide -- your instructor typically tells you which one to use. The library has links to a variety of them:
The common ones are APA (American Psychological Association), MLA (Modern Language Association), and Turabian (a version of the Chicago Style Manual). When you research, it is important to carefully keep track of the resources you used. The library has guides to APA and MLA style available as PDFs -- If you get stuck in doing research, you're welcome to email me: Topsy Smalley at tosmalle@cabrillo.edu To get to this page on the Internet
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you can search using several search terms
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