Use ABI/INFORM to find articles from magazines, trade journals and the business press including The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Barron's, and The Economist.

Use Business Source Complete to find articles from magazines, trade journals and the business press including Fortune, Bloomberg Business Week, Forbes, and Investor's Business Daily.

Trade journals, magazines written for practitioners in an industry, cover news and offer analysis from industry insiders. Examples of trade journals are Advertising Age, Beverage World and Automotive News.

Business magazines are written for a general business audience. They offer in-depth reporting, feature articles, interviews, news and commentary. Popular business magazines include Fortune, Bloomberg Business Week, and The Economist.

Newspapers cover current events in business, economics and global affairs. They offer in-depth reporting, interviews, and editorials & op-ed pieces. Some of the best known business newspapers are The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Barron's and Investor's Business Daily.

Choose Your Sources

In databases look for the filters on the left of your results page. You can limit your results by choosing the type of source you want to use. You can sort your results by relevance or by date.

Choose a Subject Database. Start your company or industry search with ABI/INFORM Global  or Business Source Complete.

Brainstorm Keywords.  Most databases, unlike Google, don't use a single search box where you enter a string of words. Instead break your research question down into one or more concepts. Develop keywords to describe each concept.

Use Boolean Operators (or logical connectors) -- AND, OR, and NOT-- They link keywords in search statements.  Boolean operators are used to broaden or narrow a search. 

AND    Keywords combined with AND will retrieve records only where both terms appear.

AND is used to narrow a search

Example:   Avon AND strategy

OR    Keywords combined with OR will retrieve records where either one or both terms appear.

OR is used to broaden a search 

Example:   competition OR competitors 

Phrase Searching. You must put quotes around the phrase. Example: "global warming"

Truncate Your Keywords.  Truncation allows you to search for plurals or other variant endings of a word. Add a “wildcard” symbol (an asterisk) to stand for one or more characters at the end of the word stem.

Example: Downsiz* will retrieve downsized or downsizing

Example: wom*n will retrieve woman or women

Be Careful: cat* will retrieve cats, category, catastrophe

Field Searching. Field searching lets you tell a database exactly where you want your keywords to be found. Look for a drop-down menu next to the keyword box and select the "Full text" field to expand your search. Target your search by selecting the field for Title, Abstract, Company Name, or Subject.

Be Creative. Your mental attitude plays a big part in designing and executing a successful search. Explore. Don't give up if your first search fails. Be patient. Use more than one database.