This webpage is designed as a quick guide to get you thinking about the range of information resources available and ways of improving your information-seeking skills.
If you would like more guidance on any of these issues, or on research tools and techniques which are specific to your discipline, please contact your Research Information Service librarian.
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In most areas of business, economics and tourism, books are a major source of information. How do you find books that are relevant to your research topic? Library catalogues are the traditional way of locating books. But which catalogue do you use? And how do you search library catalogues effectively? See the UQ Library How-To Guide on Searching Library Catalogues. Book reviews are an important resource. They keep you up to date with new publications and new critical approaches in your discipline. See the UQ Library How-To Guide on Finding Book Reviews. When you have spent some time locating relevant books, you will probably find that a high proportion of those books are published by a small number of key publishers in your area. Most of those publishers will have a website. Check these websites to find out about other books that the publisher has produced. Many of these websites will allow you to set up alerts so that you can be notified by email when new books are published. Are you familiar with the major online booksellers in your area? And don't forget Amazon.com. Electronic books (e-books) can be searched easily, and copying-and-pasting is a huge improvement on manual transcription. Google Books is a major resource. See the UQ Library How-To Guide on Electronic Books. |
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Journal Articles are the other major source of information in Business, Economics and Tourism, particularly for more recent research. Journal articles are short, scholarly and highly subject-specific, and are often available both in print format and electronically. How do you find relevant journal articles for your topic, and how do you access them? There are many multidisciplinary databases which provide the full text of millions of journal articles across all topics and disciplines. One of the largest and most useful of these is JSTOR. There are other useful full-text databases produced by major journal publishers, such as Wiley/Blackwell, Oxford Journals, Cambridge Journals, ScienceDirect. Many of these full-text resources are also indexed in Google Scholar. The full-text databases have the added advantage that you can browse through all issues of a journal. Finding detailed material on a specific topic in these full text databases can be difficult as they cover such a wide range of discipline areas. Try phrase searching: use inverted commas to indicate a phrase (e.g. "economic development"). This means that you are only looking for references where the words occur side by side. Otherwise, if possible use very specific terms which are unique to your discipline (e.g. balanced scorecard). See the UQ Library How-To Guide on Searching Databases. Subject-specific databases are essential tools, but they rarely contain the full text of the references, so they must be searched using a different approach, more like searching a library catalogue. The subject-specific databases often include other types of material, such as books, dissertations and articles published in edited books. To see all the databases that the Library subscribes to, go to our Databases Gateway and use the drop-down menu under Select a database by subject. To search databases effectively, it is important to understand the concept of controlled vocabulary. Many databases use a system of standardised subject terms (sometimes called descriptors or subject headings). Using these terms may help you to find information that you would otherwise have missed. So when you find a useful reference on a database, look at the full database record for that reference to see if there are any descriptors or subject headings in the record. Searching by those terms may yield useful results. Even with all the sophisticated information resources available today, the most widely used technique is still the traditional process of finding one important reference on the topic, reading that, and following up the references that it cites. And those references will cite other references for you to investigate, and so it goes on. This is an excellent way of familiarising yourself with the literature on the topic. Another way of improving your results is to search by cited references. The principle is simple: if there is a book or article which is fundamental to your research topic, it may be helpful to find later publications which cite that book or article. See the UQ Library How-To Guide on Cited Reference Searching. |
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Information about companies, particularly financial information, can be sourced from annual reports or from specialised databases. These databases allow you both to retrieve detailed news and information about a given company for a case study, and also to perform detailed searches across all companies or industries to build a specific list or dataset. Read the Help files for the resource you select for assistance with building your query and manipulating and downloading your data. See the UQ Library Subject guide on Company Information. |
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Government documents can be a major source of information and data. These documents include Hansard (Parliamentary debates), parliamentary papers, green papers and a wealth of government department reports. Government information and publications are becoming increasingly available via the web. However, for older material, you may need to search library catalogues or consult printed indexes. To access Australian state and federal government resources go to: australia.gov.au. |
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Your research may call for you to consult and refer to bills or legislation, either at the State or Federal level, or even at the international level. To trace the process and changes leading up to the new law being introduced you will need to consult readings and speeches made in Parliament (Hansard). State, Commonwealth and international laws as well as treaties are available online and via databases. See the UQ Library Legal Research Guide. |
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Information about market and industry data can be sourced from specialised databases. These databases allow retrieval of detailed analysis of industries to obtain reports or datasets. |
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Information can be sourced in many formats. Google Video and YouTube are both popular search tool for videos and film clips. The library subscribes to a database Informit TVNews which can be used to search for TV news stories, current affairs and documentary series broadcast on Australian television. |
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Most recently published newspaper articles can be searched via the web, although not always for free. Increasingly, older newspapers are also being digitised and turned into searchable databases, some of which are subscription-only resources, while others are available free online. For some older materials microfilm will be the only option. See the UQ Library How-To guide on News and Newspapers. |
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The reports produced by non-government, educational and private organisations (for example, the World Bank or World Health Organisation, or a university) are excellent resources for research. They are topical and academic in nature, often contain detailed statistical data, and are usually very up-to-date, often annually rewritten. Often the best place to obtain reports of this nature is from the organisation's website: see web resources below. If the report is not available electronically, your Research Information Service librarian may be able to order a copy for the library for you to view. |
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People are important sources of information. Your supervisor, your Research Information Service librarian and your fellow students will all be able to provide assistance in different ways. It is often helpful to make contact with researchers at other institutions who are working in the same area. Developing these contacts can be difficult, but blogs, discussion lists (listservs) and attendance at conferences can help. |
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Statistical datasets are available from a number of organisations, both government and non-government, and cover a range of topics. Supporting your argument with statistics can be a powerful tool for any researcher. You will need to work out which site or resource provides access to the data you require. See the UQ Library Subject Guide on Statistics (International). Read the Help files for the resource you select for assistance with building your statistical query and manipulating and downloading your dataset. |
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There is often useful information in theses (also known as dissertations) which has not (or not yet) been published elsewhere. There are a range of databases providing access to Australian and international theses. See the UQ Library How-To Guide on Finding Theses. |
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There is no easy way of navigating the wealth of resources now available on the web. Subject gateways like Intute can help to locate quality resources. There are smarter ways of searching Google, by limiting your search to specific domains such as .edu or .gov.au. See the UQ Library How-To Guide on Internet (Web) Searching. You should be aware of how to access Google Scholar via the UQ Library's proxy server, so that you can access subscription-only resources more easily when using Google Scholar. If you are off campus, always access Google Scholar via this link. To find out more about using this resource, see the UQ Library Google Scholar Help guide. |
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Unpublished source material is an essential resource for some research projects. It is often extremely difficult to locate and access. For a general introduction to this very complex topic, see the UQ Library How-To Guide on Manuscripts and Archives. |
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You may identify books and journals that you need which are not available in the UQ Library. Our document delivery service will try to obtain these for you. An important part of developing your research proposal is assessing the feasibility of gaining access to the material that you will need for your research. Do not make the mistake of assuming that the Library can obtain anything and everything for you. Some material is not available for loan and too fragile (or too voluminous) to copy. Researchers sometimes have to travel to repositories elsewhere in Australia or overseas to study source materials. |
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When you have identified useful references, how will you store and organise them? Referencing software (sometimes referred to as bibliographic management software) is designed to help you store the references which you have located, and then cite those references in the essay or thesis which you are writing. The UQ Library has negotiated site licences for Endnote and Refworks. These are products that allow you to create a personal database of references. See the UQ Library Referencing Styles and Software webpage for further information. |
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It is important to keep up to date with new publications in your field. Having done your literature search early in the course of your project, you will not want to repeat that whole process every six months to discover new publications. Fortunately, many databases allow you to set up alerts. This means that you store a search on the database and it is run again at intervals, and the results are emailed to you or delivered by RSS feeds. A number of library catalogues (including the UQ Library catalogue) offer this service. You can also set up alerts from many journal websites (to receive contents lists of new issues) and publisher websites (to receive notification of new books in nominated subject areas). See the UQ Library How-To Guide on Alerting Services, RSS Feeds & Email. |
