Business Source Complete
What is Business Source Complete?
Business Source Complete is the world's largest electronic resource
for full text scholarly business publications. Another EBSCO database, it offers full text journals
in all disciplines of business, including marketing, management, accounting, banking, and
finance, with some of the most important scholarly journals covered as far back as 1886.
Non-journal content includes financial data, books,
major reference works, book digests, conference proceedings, case studies, investment and market research
reports, industry and country reports, company profiles, and SWOT analyses (analyses of companies'
strategic environments).
What You Can Find
Business Source Complete offers a wide range of business information
over a broad scope of industries, and the database's records also contain a large amount
of information. A click on an article's title reveals
the author's name, the name of the publication in which it appears, subject terms (which make great
keywords for further searching), NAICS codes, and a quick synopsis (the abstract). You'll also see
a persistent URL (the article's permanent electronic address) and an "Add this" button
for bookmarking or sharing the article using a variety of social bookmarking or networking tools.
The database's records also have options for various actions
you can take including emailing the article, saving it, citing the article, exporting the citation
to a bibliographic manager, or adding it to your EBSCOhost folder. Records also contain links
to article citations and to full text PDF versions of the articles when available.
How Do I Find What I Need?
How to Search: Basic
There are several ways to search this database. Let's start with Basic and do some
exploring. If the Basic Search screen does not appear by default, click "Basic Search," an active
link just below the search box. Treat the blank box as you would a Google search box and enter a keyword.
Let's try "pizza."
As illustrated in the screen shot below, a broad search term such as "pizza"
usually yields an unmanageable number of results. The database provides various options for paring the results
down to a more reasonable number.
Narrowing, limiting the search
You may narrow the set of results by choosing one of the
categories in the left-hand column under the heading "Narrow results by." Similarly,
you may pare the number of results down by making selections in the right-hand column
under "Limit your results."
Limiters, seen on the right-hand side of the screen, also help focus
your search. They allow you to choose whether or not you want full text (the full article
instead of a citation, which only tells you where to find the full article); whether or not
you want peer-reviewed journals (journals whose articles are approved by
other experts before they're published); whether or not the articles must have references;
and what publication dates to include in the search. For this example, let's restrict
the search to full text articles published between 2007 and 2009.
Let's have the database show us only those items from the "pizza" search results that
have to do with the United States ("Narrow Results by" Geography - United States).
Now the database will return only those items about pizza in the U.S. published between 2007 and 2009
that appear in the database in full text format.
As you can see, that narrows the number of results quite a bit, but you
may want to narrow the search even more. To do so, you may enter the name
of a specific publication, company or industry, or choose a type of publication - such as Trade Publications - or a
subject area that is of interest. You may even want to zero in on a more specific
geographic region, Texas, for example. Clicking on the arrow to the left
of the selection by which you want to narrow the search results reveals options
available in that category. For instance, clicking on the arrow next to Source
Types shows the various sources from which items have been taken to populate the
database. They include trade publications, magazines, SWOT analyses, industry
profiles, market research reports and product reviews. Experiment with the other categories until you have a results
set that is manageable and appropriate for your research needs. |
 |
How to Search: Advanced
The Advanced Search in Business Source Complete allows you to do
limiting and narrowing upfront. It can be quite useful if you have a very specific
information need. It gives you three search boxes joined by
drop-down menus from which you may choose one of the Boolean operators "and,"
"or" or "not." You also have the option of specifying in which
of the database's fields you want the term(s) searched.
Using the pizza example again, you can put "pizza" in the first search box,
choose the "and" Boolean operator then type
"Texas" in the next search box and choose "GE Geographic Terms"
from the neighboring drop-down menu.
Scrolling down, you will also find an area where you may choose limiters
as you did in the Basic search. The example will retrieve items about pizza in Texas that are in full text format
published between January 2007 and April 2009 (the advance search lets you be more specific when choosing date ranges) in Trade Publications. With some searches, the database will
tell you that "Results may also be available for:" and give you alternate spellings, particularly for names, that are hyperlinks.
How to Search: Visual
Visual search is a graphical way of finding
what you need. You can choose one of two ways to view the information graphically.
For this example we'll have the database display the results in columns (as opposed to blocks, or rows)
and will again use our pizza example.
To start, click on the visual search tab at the top of the
screen. Enter "pizza" in the keyword blank. Below the
search box is a bar containing the phrase "Limit your results:"
and a couple of check boxes and a hyperlink. To make this search be
as comparable as possible with the previous searches, we'll check the
full text box and click on the More options hyperlink. That brings up
a screen similar to the Advanced search screen where we can specify a date range
and publication type (Trade publications). Click on search and the database
will return in the left-hand column a list of subjects by which the results may
be further broken down and the first three of the 250 most recent results for pizza available in full text
published in trade publications between January 2007 and April 2009. Click on United States and another
column will appear with more subject terms and the first three of the 64 articles that
match the search terms. Continue clicking on subject terms until you get the item(s)
you want.
Tabs on the page allow you to group, sort, filter and display results in different ways. Follow your interest down to the
most specific level and you will see
the name of the article, its date, and
where to find it.
Tabs
The tabs at the top of the Business Source Complete search page offer different ways
of approaching the
resources in the database.
- Publications: Allows you to alphabetically browse all of the publications included in the database.
- Thesaurus: Provides synonyms and search terms for the
keywords you need.
- Author Profiles: Offers an alphabetized and searchable list of the thousands of authors in the
database. Click on a name and you'll find their academic qualifications, their contact
information, articles written, plus the subjects they address in their writings and
associated keywords.
- Cited References: Enter an author, article title, publication, or year to discover how often and by whom
a particular author/article/publication has been cited.
- Company Profiles: Enter a company name or browse the alphabetized list of companies to see Datamonitor reports (Datamonitor is a leading business information company
specializing in industry analysis providing top-level information, including market
analysis, competitors, and forecasting on 10,000 companies, 2,500 industries, and
50 countries).
- Indexes: Browse the contents of the database from 18 different viewpoints including
author, DUNS number, geographic terms, ISBNs, language, people, or
reviews and products.
Other tabs, some of which have been cropped out of the image above, include one to access your folder (where you can save items relevant to your research),
New Features (which discusses new features to EBSCOhost), Ask-a-Librarian (which emails a question
and your search history, if you want, to a librarian for better search suggestions), Help (where you
can get information about the database), New Search, and Exit (which allows you to quit EBSCOhost).
How Can I Keep Track of What I Find?
Temporary Folders
When you find articles that are relevant to your research, you can place them in a
temporary folder by clicking the "Add to folder" link under each article's title.
When you go to the folder you can either print, email, save or export the articles.
 |
Once you have added an article to the folder, the link under the article's title will change from
"Add to folder" to "Remove from folder."
If you click on the folder at the top of the page when it has something in it, it will show the list of articles inside and
provide links to their full text versions, when available.
|
Permanent Folders
If you want the items in your folder to be saved from one session to another (even when
the computer is turned on and off or if you leave the library one week and come back
the next), there is a link at the top of the folder that says "Sign in to my EBSCOhost."
Clicking on it will take you to a page that allows you to set up a personal
account with EBSCO with your own user name and password.
How Can I Share What I Find?
Sending, Printing, and Saving Information
- Clicking on an article's title will take you to its full citation; from there, you may share
the article by clicking the button that says "Bookmark." In addition, you may choose any
one of the rest of these options from the citation page.
- Email will let you enter someone's email address, give the email message a subject, add comments,
and send.
- Print will estimate the number of pages before it prints. There is an online help
link to deal with different printers.
- Save will give you full instructions as to how to save your document in a variety of
formats.
- Export will let you save citations in formats for various bibliographic management software programs or in MARC21 format.
This page was created by Lisa Charbonnet in Spring 2007.
INF 382S: Library Instruction and Information Literacy, taught by Dr. Loriene Roy
School of Information, The University of Texas at Austin
The page was updated in April 2009 by Kathy Fowler.
|
