To find articles/documents on a topic, enter keywords in Business Source Complete's search boxes. The database then searches for documents which include your keywords in titles, abstracts (summaries) and other key fields. If you don't identify (and carefully organise) a strong set of keywords, you're less likely to retrieve the best results, so to help you search effectively, please follow these steps:
- Identify the words/keywords in your assignment/research question that are most relevant to your topic (i.e. words that distinguish the title from any other title). For an example, let's consider this question: "To what extent does microfinance facilitate the empowerment of women in developing countries".
Generally, it's best to ignore generic words such as "facilitate". Using our example, you might select the following keywords: microfinance, empowerment, women.
- Treat each word that you select from your title as a "separate" concept within the overall topic. Then, for each concept, identify any alternative words that have the same/similar meaning (or have opposite meanings e.g. inequality, equality). Different authors use different words to describe the same concept and if your keywords don't reflect this, you may miss important articles. Here's a list of keywords, organised by concept, based on our search example:
Concept 1
|
microfinance |
micro-finance |
microcredit |
micro-credit |
others? |
Concept 2 |
empowerment |
autonomy |
independence |
human rights |
others? |
Concept 3 |
women |
female |
feminist |
|
others? |