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Business: Support Materials: Literature Searching

What is literature searching?

A search strategy to help find relevant resources on a particular topic. If you have a good search strategy, it will help you find more relevant, high-quality information that give statements and arguments in your assignments more credibility.

The importance of keywords...

Think of this research question...

What are the advantages of corporate social responsibility?

If you were to put this entire question into a search engine, you would get limited results.

You need to select the most important keywords from the question...

Advantages AND Corporate Social Responsibility

We can then make our searches better by thinking of alternative keywords to use in our searches.

Advantages could also be...

Benefits OR Pros OR Gains.

Corporate Social Responsibility could be...

Socially responsible companies OR Business ethics OR Sustainable development.

Developing your search strategy...

When developing your search strategy think about:

  • Acronyms: e.g. Corporate Social Responsibility AND CSR.
  • Abbreviations: e.g. Director AND Dir.
  • Different spellings: e.g. Organisation AND Organization).
  • Search limits: Specific search criteria (e.g. limit to peer-reviewed articles).
  • Date range: How old can a resource be for it to be valid for your topic? 

Guides and Worksheets for Literature Searching

Library Search

Journal Quality & Alerting Services

Trouble-shooting Issues

If you are having issues accessing our resources...

  • Clear your browser cache and then restart your browser: Instructions to do this are on the Middlesex University IT services webpages.
  • Turn off your work VPN and/or use a personal non-work device: Sometimes your Work VPN and/or security software on a work device can block access to our resources.

If you continue to have access issues, please email businesslibrarian@mdx.ac.uk and we will look into the problem.