Business History: Search Strategies

All the main articles databases for business, e.g., Proquest Business, Business Source Complete and Factiva offer basic and advanced search functionality.

A successful researcher knows how to construct good searches and that means being familiar with some search strategy fundamentals. To save you time and give you a more rewarding and successful experience when searching these databases here are a couple of tips for savvy searching.

Search for variant spellings or variant forms (singulars, plurals, noun, verb, adjectives etc.) of key search concepts to enhance the relevance of your results. Add the truncation and the wildcard symbols to your search tools arsenal!

The symbols used to enable truncation or wildcard searching in a database may vary. The symbols * (truncation) and ? (wildcard) are common but not universal. Check the help in the database for specific instructions.

 

Truncation Symbol - Usually represented        by an  *	Wildcard Symbol - usually represented by a question mark ?
Use when you want to find both singular and plural forms of a word when you want to find variant forms of a concept e.g. noun, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, etc.	Use when there are unknown characters when there are variant spellings
Examples: Enter the root or word stem and replace the ending with *       manag*       Finds management, manager, manages, managing, etc.       technol*       Finds technology, technological, technologies, etc.       ethic*       Finds ethic, ethical, ethics, etc.	Examples:  Enter your search terms and replace each unknown character with a ? All known instances of the word are found with ? replaced by a letter       ne?t       Finds next, nest and neat       wom?n       Finds women and woman

Databases may handle phrase searching in different ways. It's a good practice, however, to place items which are phrases in quotations to assume that an exact phrase match occurs. For example, searching "supply chain management" will guarantee "supply" and "chain" and "management" are found next to each other in the search results. This heightens relevance of results found.

 

Complex Boolean Searches: Using ANDs and ORs in Your Search

The reality of doing research is that very often your research question cannot be distilled into one word. Research topics are often multi-faceted and in order to do research well and get relevant results you typically have to break a research question into several core concepts and you have to think about introducing synonyms for key concepts being used. For this reason the business articles databases offer you the ability to build complex Boolean searches.

 

 

Research Topic: You need to find business articles which report on fraudulent activity or scandals in auditing or financial reporting practices.

Building an Effective Search when Working with One Search Box

Structure your search as shown below when using Factiva or basic search mode in Proquest Business or Business Source Complete. It is essential to use the brackets or parentheses exactly as indicated in the examples below.

Factiva Example:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Proquest Business Example:

 

Building an Effective Search when Working with Multiple Keyword Search Boxes

Typically business article databases offer you an advanced search mode. Ironic as this may sound, this often makes it easier for you to build a complex Boolean search as this example illustrates:

The search results for both of these searches will find the words audit, audits, auditing, auditor, auditiors or the phrase financial reporting combined with the words fraud, frauds, fraudulent or the words scandal, scandals, scandalous.

Some databases such as Proquest Business or Business Source Complete provide  useful links to topics that may be relevant to your search.  These are displayed when search results load and you can click on them to find the articles on these topics.

 

In ProQuest Business,  the suggested subjects are displayed and labelled as "Related Searches" under your initial keyword search box as shown below. This can result in a more manageable and relevant result set by only gathering the articles with the suggested subject.

 

In Business Source Complete, the suggested subjects are listed on the left side of the screen below the search results. It allows you to individually choose all the subjects that are relevant to your search in order to get more accurate articles that are related to your topic.

 

Advanced Search - this option is available on most databases, and allows you to specialize your search based on documents (books, articles, video etc), date, geographic location, language, etc.

Quotation Marks - using quotation marks will allow you to search for exact phrases.  For example, searching "mental impairment" will only retreive searches with both "mental" and "impairment" together in that order.

Refine Search - many online databases allow you to specify your search criteria after selecting your keywords and clicking on search.