Reminder
Databases can only be accessed while you are physically on campus and using a public access computer, due to the legal restrictions in our contracts with the companies.
Databases (and what to use them for)
- Regional Business News This link opens in a new windowIncludes full text articles from 75 business journals, newspapers and newswires from all metropolitan and rural areas within the United States. Use for keeping up with regional business news, getting a sense for a community, and local business information.
- Business Source Complete This link opens in a new windowContains a lot of everything, including news, SWOT reports, and academic studies of industries. Use for getting the broad picture of a particular industry, finding scholarly studies of industries and businesses, getting SWOT data on public companies, and for taking a long shot to find data you can't figure out where to look for.
How to use databases
There are a couple of rules that all the databases tend to follow.
- Search using key concepts rather than complete sentences
- For example, don't use "Does advertising on social media drive up sales for small shoe companies?"
- Use "Advertising AND "social media" AND sales AND shoes"
- Put phrases such as "social media" in quotes.
- Connect concepts using AND. This tells the database to find articles containing all of the words connected by AND.
- On the left or right side of each database is a number of checkboxes. These are similar to the filters used in online shopping sites like Amazon: they zoom in on the exact type of product (or in this case, article) that you need.
