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Business : Independent Study

Basics on doing research at Dartmouth. Searching for scholarly books and articles, and managing sources and citations

Search the Catalog

Not available at Dartmouth?  Try:

  • BorrowDirect - Request books, quick delivery, from other Ivy League libraries.
  • Interlibrary Loan - Request articles or books via interlibrary loan.

  • Would you like to see a book added to the collection?  Email us with your suggestions.

Search the Web

Make the most of your web searches. 

If you're on the Dartmouth network, Google Scholar will link back to Library-subscribed journals and publications.

Use the Advanced Search features in Google.   

  • Limit to PDF files to find reports: filetype:pdf 
  • Limit to Excel files for data: filetype:xls
  • Limit your results to a domain like .edu, .org, or .gov: site:.gov

Article Databases

Should I search more than one database?  Depending upon what you're looking for, YES.  Although there's overlap, all publications aren't in every database, e.g. Harvard Business Review is in Business Source & Sloan Managment Review is in ABI/Inform.  If you don't want to miss something, search more than one.

Start with a question:

"How does board diversity affect the bottom line in banking?"

Break your question into concepts, using synonyms or similar ideas together.

Concept A

  

Concept B

  

Concept C

Board

AND

diversity

AND

profit
OR

OR

OR
Board of Directors

inclusion

performance
OR 

OR

OR
Corporate Directors

gender

benefits

 

Use your terms in the database search:

(HINT: Use the * to truncate your search terms. Perform* will return performance, performing, performed etc.. 5221* returns all NAICS codes that start with those digits.)

Sample search criteria from Business Source UltimateSample search from Business Source Ultimate

Creating Citations

Manage Sources & Citations with Zotero

Zotero is a great free reference manager that collects all your references in a single, searchable application (your library). You can add PDFs, images, websites, and really anything else. It can attach pdf files to the parent record for an item and saves all the links and information you need.

  • Keep track of references, links, and pdfs as you research a topic
  • Insert references and bibliographies into your research papers in seconds

Start here - Zotero Essentials - for a quick walk-through.

  • Zotero can be downloaded (free) from https://www.zotero.org.
  • Zotero is free, but charges for storage exceeding 300MB. However, you can choose to back up just your citations to the cloud, which means you will never hit the storage limit.