What is Database Searching?-2

Database Searching

Many students turn to Wikipedia as the beginning of the research, but they should not stop there. Wikipedia is a good place to start, but a bad place to end.  What that means is that you should use Wikipedia for the sources in the bibliography at the bottom of the page and then expand your search from there. Databases are compilations of articles, research reports and electronic books.  A good general business database is Business Source Complete.

Using Business Source Complete 

You have access to hundreds of databases about every topic.  Business Source Complete is a citation, abstracts, and full text database that indexed journals; books; financial data; reference works; conference proceedings; company, industry, investment, marketing, and country reports, SWOT analyses; and case studies. Full text is provided as HTML and PDF. You can limit to peer-reviewed sources and also narrow the time frame of the articles.

Basic Searching tutorial can be found here Links to an external site.
Advanced Searching tutorial can be found here Links to an external site.

Here is a basic search of "minimum wage" AND increas* within Business Source Complete:

 

Let's talk about some of the ways that we can narrow that down...
Narrowing Your Search
On the left hand side of the screen, you can narrow down by several different methods, including by:

• Type of article (scholarly/peer-reviewed)
• Content type (book, magazine, journal article)
• limit by specific journal
• Subject
• Publication date
• Language

For example, you can limit by date range, since the 3,880 articles date back to 1915.  Using the roller bar on the left, you can narrow that down to recent articles.

Once you narrow the search down to the most recent time period, the results lower from 3,880 to 1,451:

In addition to narrowing the date range, you can also narrow by subject, which is an option on the left hand of the screen.

 

Once you select the subject of minimum wage--United States, your results will have narrowed to 245, which is easier to scan than 3,880 articles. 

 

As you can see, searching consists of choosing keywords, and then narrowing the results to a level that you can handle.  There are many other databases and even a search engine that searches many databases at once, called the Discovery Tool.  It will be described in the next section.