Business and Management

A Library Subject Guide

Business Research Tips and Techniques

Business Research Tutorial
This page provides links to web pages that explain how to conduct company, industry, market, product, and country research, as well as other types of business-related research

Use:

Always capitalize Boolean Operators (AND, OR, NOT) in your search statement.
AND
This strategy will narrow your search.
OR
This strategy will broaden your search. Put words linked by OR inside parentheses ( ).
Quotation marks " "
Using quotation marks will ensure that the database finds results that use that exact phrase.
Asterisk *
The * symbol tells the database to search for alternative word endings, for example: cultur* will search for culture, cultures, cultural

Words to include
For a business research topic, you may want to include company names or keywords from your topic.
Use quotation marks
This will find documents that contain the exact phrase placed between the quotation marks.
Use * (an asterisk)
This will find various endings of the word fragment before the *. For example, searching for manage* will find documents containing manager, managers, management, etc. Note that you can use an asterisk in a phrase enclosed in quotation marks.

manage* AND communicat* AND ("virtual team*" OR "distributed team*")

Add more keywords, using AND
If you find that you are retrieving too many results, add more keywords to reflect additional concepts related to your topic.

manage* AND communicat* AND ("virtual team*" OR "distributed team*") AND trust

Add more keywords, using OR
If you are having trouble finding enough results, add synonyms or related terms for terms already used in your search statement.

manage* AND communicat* AND ("virtual team*" OR "distributed team*" OR "remote team*" OR "dispersed team*")

You can review your searching skills with our Database Searching Basics guide and this UMGC Library Webinar on Boolean Searching.