Emerald Fulltext

Connect on campus here
Connect off campus here
Teach yourself to use Emerald
Search features
Reviewing, printing and saving references
Browsing journal contents, retrieving citations and the Alert service

Emerald contains the journals and books from one publisher only, Emerald Group Publishing. All journals and all but the most recent books are available in full text.

When should you use this database?
This database contains academic, scholarly, theoretical articles on management and business, so use it for projects or for research on e.g. motivation, knowledge management, six sigma, quality control, consumer psychology, finance etc.. Sometimes there may be a case study on a company or market, but you will not find comprehensive information on commercial issues, news or financial information.

Emerald contents

  • Journals on engineering, general management, human resources, information management, library and information services, marketing, operations and production management, property, quality, training and education. A list is available in the database. The majority of journals are on management and business.
  • All journals are academic, scholarly or peer reviewed, there are no trade journals or magazines, and you will not find company or market information.
  • The Emerald books collection is also available (but not the most recent ones). These are, in effect, annual journals and contain articles similar to those in the journals.
  • An E-mail alert service is available (see the last section) sending new issues of the journal titles you select, or articles that match previous searches you have made.

Connect on campus here

Click on the on campus URL: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/ft

Connect off campus here

  • For off campus users this database uses Athens authentication. Do not try to login to Athens from 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://www.emeraldinsight.com/Insight/athenslogin.jsp
  • A message: Welcome: Oxford Brookes University, appears at the top of the left margin if you have logged in successfully. If not, you will be asked for payment for articles!

Contact the Subject Team at: businesslibrarians@brookes.ac.uk if you have any difficulties.

Teach yourself to use Emerald

  • An exercise on using Emerald is available 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_Emerald.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 Emerald you are recommended to click on Advanced Search in the left margin. Advanced search is easier to use because it prompts you to enter all search details.
  • The default is setting of the tabs along the top of the Advanced Search screen is All. This means that books and journals are searched, but we do not subscribe to the Bibliographic Databases or Case Studies which are listed with the results.
  • For further explanation of all of the features below consult: Searching and getting the best from databases

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.

Indexing

  • Click on the drop down menu next to All fields and it is possible to specify that your entry must be found in the Author, Content item title (i.e. article or book title) , Publication Title or Keywords (called Subject Terms in EBSCO databases), for example.
  • Searching in the Keywords in theory should retrieve more focused results because you will be searching the indexing terms that have been selected to describe the focus of the article. However, you must be warned that Emerald indexing is not very consistent.
  • There is not a thesaurus of keywords that have been agreed for use as there is in Business Source Complete. It is necessary to guess Keywords, search and then check results to see if they are used. Try again if you have not found Keywords.
  • Leaving the entry as All Fields will search for terms in the full text of the articles (a free text search). This may be a good strategy to try. The default display for Emerald results lists them by relevance, i.e. the maximum hits of the search terms you entered are listed first (they can be changed to newest first). This is taken to mean that the first articles listed are more focused on the search terms you entered. If you do this the date facility may be useful:

Dates

  • It is possible to amend the date of material retrieved by using the drop down menus next to Items published between. This can be very helpful if your results are relevance ranked as explained just above because you can select the newer ones.

Types of journal articles

  • When the Journals, rather than the All tab has been selected it is possible to click on the All Types drop down menu to select material that is theoretical, case study material, editorial material, a literature review etc. Most users do not need to bother with this specialist feature, but the literature review can be useful for researchers.

Reviewing, printing and saving references

  • Initial results are listed in separate sections, starting with Journals. Scroll down to see Books. Note that we do not have a subscription to bibliographic databases or case studies.
  • Click on the hypertext linked number of results e.g. View all 12345 results to see the full list.
  • Note that the default order in which they are listed is by Relevance (maximum number of hits of the search terms first), but there is a link to Sort by: Newest first Oldest first.
  • Click on Abstract for a brief summary of what the article is about, also for a list of the Keywords attached to help you to select the correct ones.
  • If the full text is available, there is usually a choice of PDF or HTML
  • Select PDF to obtain an exact copy of the original article. Please note that you need Adobe Acrobat software to enable this. When on the screen a print can be made in the usual way.
  • Select HTML to retrieve a plain text copy of the article, but, tables or diagrams will be inserted via hypertext links in the text, and have to be displayed and printed or saved separately, so you are recommended to select PDF.

 Browsing journal contents, retrieving citations and the Alert service

  • If you want to browse the contents of journals, or if you have a citation giving a volume and issue number, click on Browse in the left margin. It is then possible to select journal titles, open a list of issues and click on the issue to retrieve contents.
  • A free alert service is available to all users. Click on Support Services in the bottom left margin, then For the user, then Register for My profile via this simple form. This enables you to register your own username and password (which can be anything you choose) with Emerald to set up your own profile. It is possible either to be alerted to additions to the database of articles that match a particular search you have entered, or to be alerted to the addition of new issues of any Emerald journal. In both cases hypertext linked e-mails enabling retrieval of the full text of the articles will be sent to you.