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For Library research help, please contact Moninder Lalli, Librarian for Labour Studies by email or Ask a librarian.
Essay
Start Your Research Here - This page gives you an overview of the research process, or in other words how to find materials for your essay.
Selected encyclopedias and books
It is useful to start by obtaining an overview of a topic by consulting scholarly encyclopedias, handbooks or even textbooks. These assist with identifying key authors, debates and resources.
- Building a Better World: An Introduction to Trade Unionism in Canada [print]
- Cambridge handbook of the changing nature of work
- Canadian Labour Relations: An Information Manual [print]
- Handbook Global History of Work
- Handbook of Employment and Society: Working Space [print]
- Labour Market Economics: Theory, Evidence, and Policy in Canada [print]
- Palgrave International Handbook of Human Trafficking
- Work and Labour in Canada: Critical Issues [print]
For more, check out Labour Studies Guide's, Background Information tab.
Find books
How to use the Library Catalogue [guide]
Do a Library Catalogue search to see if the Library owns or provides access to the sources that you've identified.
Search for books by a specific author or organization
Select "Author" from the pulldown menu in the Browse Search.
For known items it is best to check using "Browse by title" icon. E.g. Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and dimed [print], [electronic]
Search by topic, using Basic or Advanced Search
- (labor OR labour) AND canad*
- ("labour union*" OR "labor union*" OR "trade union*") AND (women OR female*) AND Canad*
Limit the results by subject (left-hand column) and resource type, books - ("forced labour" OR "slave labour" OR "human trafficking") AND ("human rights" OR abuse OR exploit*)
- Results limited to "Books". You can further limit results by "Subject"
Proper syntax for Boolean logic (words that allow you to combine concepts)
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")
Look at the titles in the "results list" and for those books that look relevant, click on their subject headings to find more books on that topic.
Find books by subject
Browse by Subject (change the default "title" to "subject"). Browse by Subject will only result in books, not book chapters or journal articles.
- Employee Rights
- Equality -- Canada
- Forced Labor
- Foreign workers -- Canada
- Human trafficking
- Check for names of countries under this general heading
- Human trafficking -- Canada
- Human Trafficking -- Government Policy
- Immigrants -- Employment -- British Columbia
- Labor
- Labor -- Canada
- Labor laws and legislation -- British Columbia
- Labor laws and legislation -- Canada
- Labor market -- British Columbia
- Labor Market -- Canada
- Labor movement -- Canada
- Labor policy -- British Columbia
- Labor policy -- Canada
- Labor Supply -- British Columbia
- Labor supply -- Canada
- Labor Unions -- Canada
- Labor unions -- United States
- People with disabilities -- Employment -- British Columbia
- Race Discrimination -- Canada
- Trade unions See Labor unions
- Women -- Employment -- Canada
- Youth -- Employment -- Canada
Journal articles
Use these indexes/databases to locate journal articles on your topic. Use the "Get@SFU" icon to find a copy of the article.
Databases
Sociological Abstracts - for articles related labor and employment issues
Business Source Complete
A good place to start your search for academic or practitioner articles on labor and employment issues. It also contains industry and market reports, company profiles, country economic reports, and more.
CBCA Full Text Business
Canadian focus: Trade journals, general business publications, academic journals, topical journals, and professional publications.
Canada Commons (formerly, Canadian Electronic Library from desLibris) - for public policy documents from Canadian institutes, think-tanks and research groups.
For more useful databases consult the databases guide for Labour Studies.
If you have a reference (citation) for a book or journal article from another source, you can also use From Citation to Article to locate a copy.
For more databases, try Labour Studies Databases
Labour statistics
Often you can find summarized data (with analysis) as part of published reports, so consider publications by governmental and international organizations, independent researchers, special interest groups/associations, etc. Remember to think about potential bias or influence when examining these materials.
British Columbia
Current BC socio-economic statistics, including quick facts and historical tables.
Canada
Subject: Labour
Includes information such as how many people are employed or unemployed, unemployment rate, industries or occupations that people work in, hours of work, commuting patterns, wage and non-wage benefits, job training, labour mobility, work absences, unionization, unpaid work, etc. Also includes geographic and demographic characteristics.
- Labour Force Survey - (monthly) - measures the current state of the Canadian labour market and is used to calculate the national, provincial, territorial and regional employment.
For more, consult: BC Statistics, Canadian Census, Statistics Canada
Government regulations
British Columbia
Canada
- Workplace standards
- Labour laws, workplace standards, health and safety standards and labour relations.
- Laws and regulations
- Canada Industrial Relations Board
- Consolidated Statutes and Regulations
- Government of Canada, Labour Program
Labour organizations and research institutes
- BC Federation of Labour
- Canadian Association for Work and Labour Studies
- Canadian Labour Congress
- LabourStart - for daily news on Canadian labour issues
Search tips and techniques
- Use "or" to combine same concept
- Use "and" to combine different concepts
- Use "quotation marks" to search for an exact phrase
- Use asterisk (*) the truncation symbol, for variation on endings of words (work* will find: work, works, worker, working, workforce, etc.)
- For Abbreviations, also use full names: ILO or "international labour organization"
- Search Tips for Google and Google Scholar
- Use intitle: to force Google to find those words in the titles of results. Use quotation marks ("") to search for phrases
- intitle:"airport security"
- intitle:"airport security"
- Use filetype: to tell Google to find certain filetypes
- filetype:pdf
- filetype:pdf
- Use site: to specify results from a government web site
- "Airport security” site:gov
- Use intitle: to force Google to find those words in the titles of results. Use quotation marks ("") to search for phrases
Library guides
- Annotated bibliographies
- Evaluating sources
- How to find journal articles
- How to place an Inter-Library Loan request - SFU Library can obtain books and articles from another library (free).
- Library Catalogue search guide
- What is a scholarly (or peer-reviewed) journal?
- What is plagiarism? Guide to common forms of plagiarism and how to avoid them.
- Citation or reference management tools (Zotero or Mendeley) - use these tools to manage your citations and to create bibliographies for your papers. For assistance with Zotero or Mendeley, email, citation-managers@sfu.ca.