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Introduction

This guide is designed for students in Graduate Business Programs such as MBA, EMBA, MOT, GDBA and MSc. Finance.  It includes tips for literature searches, with emphasis on using business databases, which give you access to information not freely available on the open web.

Other starting points:

• Executive MBA in Indigenous Business and Leadership guide
• Belzberg Library Information for Graduate Business Programs (Belzberg Library is located in downtown Vancouver)
• After you graduate and for students of the GDBA or the Radius Programs, try the UBC's Small Business Accelerator guides
• Welcome video -- for a quick introduction to using the Library website for research and to get help.

Research help

You can contact Moninder Lalli, Librarian for Graduate Business Programs (moninder_lalli@sfu.ca) for assistance via email or to make an appointment. Or Ask a librarian. 

Resources for business information

  Start with Business information resources to find recommended sources, and for search tips that will save you time. This guide includes Facts & data sources, citing help, and more. 

For resources on specialized topics like Company information, Industry surveys, and Market research, see Additional resources: Business information sources.

News from our BUEC Buzz blog

Follow the BUEC Buzz to keep on top of new resources available for business & economics research at SFU: RSS

Video tutorials for finding business information

Mark Bodnar, Business and Economics Librarian, has created the following tutorials which will provide tips and strategies for finding business information:

• Actions vs Words: Understanding a Company's Strategies Using News Sources - (11.35 mins.)"this one is about using news sources to gather information about what a company has been doing so that you can infer the company's strategy, rather than relying solely on the company's explicit statements or third-party analysis." [Mark Bodnar]
   
• Spying on a Conversation: Literature Review Assignments in Business - (18.25 mins.)"provides lots of tips and tricks to make the research for your next literature review assignment much more efficient and effective" [Mark Bodnar]
   
• Secondary Research for Business Decisions: Foundations for Estimates - (8.02 mins.) to cover the all-important principles that underlie many of the presentations I do in Beedie classes. [Mark Bodnar]
   
  • For more on secondary research, try Mark's 12-part series of posts "on research to support new outdoor recreation services, but the steps involved are common to many research topics and the advice I've provided is based on my meetings with thousands of researchers over the years." [Mark Bodnar]
     
• An earlier video tutorial, Only 4 Steps: Researching in Academic Business Journals (6.30 mins.), provides basic instruction on how to break down your topic and do a literature search.

Business databases

  Business Source Complete is a key resource, and includes business journals (trade and scholarly), industry reports, and country profiles.  Start here to search most business topics or for specific journal articles.   See Only 4 Steps: Researching in Academic Business Journals (6.30 mins. video tutorial), to learn how to break down your topic and do a literature search.

Try combining keywords for your research topic:

("small business or entrepreneur*) and (manag* or personnel or employee*)

Business databases by area of concentration:

• Accounting
• Finance
• HR/Management and Organizational Studies
• International Business
• Management Information Systems
• Management Science
• Marketing
• News resources: Finding newspaper articles and newspapers
• SAGE Business Cases  

Find books, journals, and other publications at SFU Library

Search the Library Catalogue to search for books, and to search for journal articles by citation, journal title, article title, or topic.  For any of the sample searches below, try limiting the search results by "Subject" (left-hand side) or "Resource type."

Sample searches:

• ("small business" OR entrepreur*) AND (manag* OR personnel OR employee*)
• derivative* AND (speculat* OR hedging OR risk)

Combine different concepts using AND
Combine same concepts using OR
Use quotation marks to search for a phrase
Use brackets for synonyms
Use asterisk (*) for different endings of words

Note:  For Catalogue Search, when combining concepts, use CAPITAL letters ( "OR", "AND")

Selected subject headings of interest:

• Entrepreneurship
• Hedging (Finance)
• Indian business enterprises -- Canada
• Portfolio management
• Project management
• Small business -- Management
• Small business -- Planning

TIP: When you find a relevant book, try clicking on the "Subject" link in the full Library record for more books on that topic.

Selected Library books

Advanced search tips and strategies

 The Library Catalogue Search Guide provides search tips for effective searching, including power searching, and strategies for finding books and journal articles.

To optimise your searching on the open web, see Search tips for Google, Google Scholar, and other search engines.

Citation searching and impact metrics

Citation searching is a useful strategy to check to see if a work that is relevant for your research has been cited by anyone else since it was initially published.   Enter the "citation" information into Google Scholar, using the link from SFU Library.  If your citation appears in the results list, check beneath it for "Cited by."

For more on measuring the quantitative impact of articles, journals, or authors, see Impact metrics.

Past SFU MBA projects

You can also see examples of MBA research projects completed by previous SFU graduate business students.

Google searching

Search tips for Google, Google Scholar, DuckDuckGo, and other search engines

Search for a topic: Indigenous land claims in British Columbia

(aboriginal OR indigenous) land claims (BC OR British Columbia)
  Results

Search results limited to words in the title of document, using "intitle:".  Use capital "OR" for synonyms. Put braces "()" around words that mean the same thing. 

  intitle:"wine industry"   intitle:(BC OR British Columbia OR Okanagan) 
    Results

Search for documents from a particular country's domain.  The example below is for India, with country code of ".in". 
Other country codes:  Web country codes

   Search for documents from websites in India about elders and families

     site:.in (elderly OR seniors OR aged) intitle:families 
       Results

Library guides

• Avoiding plagiarism
• Finding and evaluating resources on the web
  • Evaluating sources [video from Western University 2:16 mins]
• How to write an annotated bibliography
• How to place an Inter-Library Loan request
• Presenting: Business presentations
• Search tips for Google and Google Scholar
• What is a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal?
• Library Tutorials

Writing and citing help

For writing support services, see: 

• Writing Services Offered by the Research Commons.
• Writing: Business writing and Academic writing resources
• Upcoming workshops

For citing help, see the SFU Library guide: Citation Guide for Business Sources.