Business Source Complete on EBSCOhost

Business Source Complete contents
Connect to EBSCOhost on campus here
Connect to EBSCOhost off campus here
Teach yourself to use EBSCOhost
Search features
Searching references and citations
Browsing one journal or finding a specific article
E-mail alerts of new issues of journals
Country information
Industry profiles
Datamonitor company profiles
Reviewing, printing and saving references

 

Business Source Complete is available via EBSCOhost, the web service run by EBSCO. A huge variety of useful business, management and economics sources are available.

When should you use this database?

The contents of this database are so comprehensive that this is uniquely a database you should check out for every assignment you undertake. Read the instructions below carefully to get the best from it.

Business Source Complete contents

Journals

  • This database guides you to to articles in nearly 1800 peer reviewed (i.e. academic or scholarly) journals in management, business studies and economics which are abstracted and indexed (an abstract is a paragraph which tells you what the article is about). This is the first database to search to find articles on the subject you want.
  • It is also possible to search within the citations of most of these articles. This is most useful for researchers and students doing dissertations.
  • An alerting service allows sends you a link by e-mail to the latest issues of journals you select when they are added.
  • Full text is not available with every abstract, but it is available for 1160 titles although there is usually a 1 year embargo on new issues.
  • EBSCO have added the full text dating back to at least 1965 for over 300 core management journals. The Harvard business review dates back to 1922; the Quarterly journal of economics dates back to 1886.
  • Many full text foreign language journals are also available.
  • If there is only an abstract the LinkSource facility allows you to check electronic subscriptions that we may have with other publishers, or it connects you to the catalogue to check if it is available in print.
  • If we do not provide an electronic or print subscription ask about the Inter-Library Loans service which will provide photocopies of articles.
  • Over 4000 full text trade journals are also available. These are journals such as "Air conditioning, heating and refrigeration news" or "DIY week" which give useful industry and company news for market and company based assignments.

Country reports

  • Country reports from the Economist Intelligence Unit and other publishers giving analysis of economies all over the world are available.

Industry profiles

  • Approximately 2800 full-text industry reports from three different providers are available, including 1600 full-text industry profiles averaging 10-12 pages from Datamonitor. Please note that the Datamonitor Reports are not the (highly priced) full-length reports but a condensed version. Nevertheless, they contain sufficient information to give a useful insight into a huge variety of international markets.

Company profiles

  • Company profiles for over 10,000 leading world companies are available from Datamonitor. They often include SWOT analyses and lists of competitors.

Connect to EBSCOhost on campus here

Click on the on campus URL: http://search.ebscohost.com

When you enter EBSCOhost, select Business Source Complete from the list.

Connect to EBSCOhost off campus here

For off campus users this database uses Athens authentication. Do not try to login to Athens within the database, it will not work!

Login to Athens first by clicking on the Athens login button at the bottom of the Brookes Library homepage:

http://www.brookes.ac.uk/library

Enter your Oxford Brookes Username and Password.

For the next 8 hours you will remain logged in to Athens so long as you do not close your browser. Click on the off campus URL for the database you require and you will automatically be connected.

Use the back button to navigate back to this page and click on the off campus URL:

http://search.ebscohost.com/athens.asp?

When you enter EBSCOhost, select Business Source Complete from the list.

If you have any problems contact: businesslibrarians@brookes.ac.uk

Teach yourself to use EBSCOhost

Business Source Complete is a huge database with diverse contents. There are many features that are difficult to describe in writing, so we recommend that you look at the exercise on using this database in our Virtual Learning Course "A guide to using business and economics databases", which covers most (not all) of the business databases. Every student and member of staff can register themselves by consulting the page on the Virtual Learning Course at: http://www.brookes.ac.uk/library/business/virtuallearning.html

However, for your convenience we have linked the exercise from here: https://www2.brookes.ac.uk/library/resources/How_to_use_Ebscohost.pdf

This document is on the intranet, off campus users will have to enter their Brookes username and password to enter. Register for the course if you want to check the self-test results

Contact a member of the subject team at businesslibrarians@brookes.ac.uk if you have difficulties.

Search features

When you enter Business Source Complete the default screen is the Advanced Search, which gives you a "form" to fill out. For further explanation of all of the features below consult

Boolean searching

This is a complicated sounding name for something that is very simple.

  • A common mistake is to type in a description of what you want: e.g. marketing in small business. This is not helpful. You must use AND, OR, NOT from the drop-down menus to connect search terms. This is known as Boolean searching.
  • Enter marketing AND small business.
  • Google automatically enters AND between every search term without showing it, but Ebscohost does not.

Truncation

  • Entering a term with *, e.g. market*, will retrieve all terms which have the same stem, e.g. markets, marketing, marketed etc.
  • ? can be used in a similar way especially with American spellings e.g. labo?r will retrieve labor and labour.

Indexing

  • Use indexes. Click on the drop down index next to 'Select a Field (optional)' and it is possible to specify that your entry must be found in the Author, Title (article) , Publication Name or Subject Terms, for example.
  • Searching in the Subject terms will retrieve more focused results because you will be searching the indexing terms that have been selected to describe the focus of the article.
  • The indexing terms that have been agreed for use are listed in the Thesaurus in the Toolbar. Small enterprise, Small medium enterprise and SME are not indexing terms, but Small business is.

Search Options

Scroll down the Advanced Search screen to find these.

  • Click on the Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals box to retrieve articles from more academic, scholarly journals only. Trade journals can be useful, but not when you have a more theoretical, academic subject to research.
  • Click on Also search within the full text of the articles if you are desperate to find your search terms.Under normal circumstances this would retrieve far too many references.

Searching references and citations

  • New students need not worry too much about these features, but they are useful for researchers. EBSCO list the references at the end of articles from peer reviewed, scholarly journals in Business Source Complete.
  • If there is a hypertext link for Cited references at the bottom of the results , click on it to see the list of citations from the article.
  • The number of other articles that give the same citation is listed. An article cited only once is probably not as highly regarded as those cited many times.
  • Tick the box next to the citation, then at the top of the column tick Related References to see all the other articles that also cite it.
  • Sometimes there is a hypertext link for Times cited in this database under titles in your results. Click to get a listing of all the articles and sometimes the full text of the articles in Business Source Complete that subsequently cited the article in hand. In this way it is possible to trace the future development of the subject.
  • A final feature that also enormously enhances the searching power of the database is the references search facility. Click on More in the top toolbar, then on Cited References. It is possible to search only the citations in the articles in the database for e.g. authors. Also it is possible to specify journal titles that are not abstracted in the database (the journals may not be in the database, but you can collect the references from all the articles in the database). Finally you can enter subject searches in the All Citation fields box.

Browsing one journal or finding a specific article

  • If you do not know the date and volume number, enter the journal title in the search box. Click on the drop down menu and click on SO Publication name. In the next search box enter a substantial portion of the article title. From the drop down menu select Title and then, click on Search. Or, enter the author's name and select Author from the drop down menu.
  • If you know the volume and issue of the journal, click on the Publications link on the toolbar. In the screen that appears enter your journal title and click on Search. It is possible to click on the hypertext linked journal title in the entry that appears to get a list of the full text years and subsequently issue numbers on the database. Clicking on the issue numbers gives the citations of articles in that issue with full text links.

E-mail alerts of new issues of journals

  • Click on the Publications link as described in the previous section and enter the name of your journal and click Search. In the next screen note that there is an orange RSS feed symbol next to the titles of the journals and continue by clicking on the title of the journal you want.
  • In the next screen that shows publication details, note that there is a hypertext link Alert/Save/Share in the top right corner. Click on this and in the callout that appears click on Create an alert. Follow the instructions to set up an alert for the journal. Any username and password made up by you can be used, this is not related to any Oxford Brookes passwords. A list of the articles of every new issue of the journal added to the database will be e-mailed to you and you may be able to link to full text if there is not an embargo.

Country information

  • Valuable information is available on the economic and political background of countries in Business Source Complete, but may be difficult to find using normal search methods. The excellent Country Profiles and Country Reports published by the Economist Intelligence Unit are available. These are recognised as the most authoritative reports on the market.
  • Click on the Publications link. Enter the country name, for example, China, in the search box and click on the Match any words option to find a list of publications with that country in the title and a list will appear. As suggested above, particularly look for the EIU reports e.g. Country profile China and Country Report China.
  • OECD Economic Surveys, which are published annually as booklets up to 100 pages long for every OECD member country giving commentary on every aspect of their economies are also available. OECD Economic Outlook is also available. This is a biannual journal giving a briefer updating on member countries economies and also an update on the situation outside the OECD. To obtain a listing of all these valuable sources click on the Publications link as above and enter OECD for a full listing of reports.

Industry profiles

  • There are two methods of searching for industry reports. Enter the name of the industry in the Advanced search box (make sure that you think of all the alternative terms that might be used).
  • Either, scroll down to the box headed Publication type and from the drop down menu select Industry Profile, then click on Search.
  • Or, enter the name of the industry you are researching in the search box and click on Search. When the results appear click on Industry Profiles in the left margin.

Datamonitor company profiles

  • Click on More on the top toolbar then click on Company Profiles. In the next screen enter the name of the company and click on Browse. The profiles cover basic activities, finances, top management chief competitors (not always obvious and for whom there will also be profiles) and note that extremely useful SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analyses are usually available.

Reviewing, printing and saving references

Your results appear as a list of titles starting with the most recent. Click on titles to retrieve abstracts.
  • If there is a link to PDF Full Text, click to retrieve a photographic copy of the original which is the most useful.
  • If you wish to save it, it is preferable to e-mail the PDF file to yourself. Click on the title of the article in the results list to retrieve the abstract, click on the E-mail button, and fill out your e-mail address.
  • If there is a link to HTML Full Text, it is possible to retrieve a plain text file without graphics, which is not so satisfactory as the PDF version, but it does download more quickly if you have a slow internet connection.
  • If there is a hypertext link Check LinkSource for further information, it is possible to check to see if there is electronic full text provided from many other journals to which the Library subscribes. You will have to use Athens authentication to connect to LinkSource and to the article if off campus. This is quite complicated, so check out the exercise from the Virtual Learning course mentioned above for guidance: https://www2.brookes.ac.uk/library/resources/How_to_use_A-Zlist.pdf
  • If electronic access is not available via LinkSource you will be invited to check the Library catalogue for print copies.