Transcript - How to do a literature search for level 3 and postgraduate Business students

Welcome to the session on Finding, Selecting, and Referencing Sources for business. My name's Amanda. And I'm going to be doing this recording for you today.  

By the end of this recording, we hope that you'll be able to develop and carry out a search strategy, identify relevant sources for your topic, know why referencing is important, and know where you can go for more help.  

So the first question we get asked a lot is where should I search, and what are databases, and why should I use them? Library databases are specialist collections of thousands of books, journals, articles, newspapers, images, et cetera.  

There are over 500 databases on a wide range of subjects. Many of them have their own search tools which allow you to be more precise with language and deliver more relevant results.  

Now some of you will have already used library search and want to know what's the difference between Library Search and the library databases. Well, Library Search is a tool that searches across all of our databases. So it's over 500.  

And it usually brings about more than enough results for your assignments. But sometimes you find you're a bit overwhelmed and you get results that aren't relevant to what you need and that it might be more useful to searcha a specialist database, especially if you're doing a project or studying at master's level.  

There are some limitations to Library Search, too. It doesn't connect particularly well to some databases. Usually, these are image databases, law databases, or newspaper databases. But in most other cases, it works very, very well.  

If you have a specific subject, I think, it's searching a specific specialist database gives you relevance and fewer results. But let's have a quick look at what you can do with Library Search, and then we'll move on to the databases.  

So now I'm going to share my screen with you. OK. So I've gone to the library website. And this is probably familiar to some of you.  

And Library Search is really just this box on the Home page. Oh, I've clicked something already. Let's go back.  

And let me try putting something into it. So I can type in The Economic Impact of Brexit. And then we're going to click on Search.  

OK. If you get this pale yellow band across here saying Sign In For Easier Access, please do. And you'll know you're signed in, because your name will appear at the top right of the screen. In a moment, you should see mine come up. Yes, so there we go. I'm locked in now.