When searching Business Source Complete, you can use search techniques that are commonly used in other databases and search engines.
You need to type in the keywords or phrases of your research question. So, for example, if your question was...
How can social media be used to market a business?
...you could try the key words/ phrases:
"social media" (putting a quote in quotation marks will search for that exact phrase)
AND market
AND business
You then might like to think about synonyms (words with similar or the same meaning) so your search might become:
"social media"
AND market* OR promot* OR advert*
AND business OR organisation OR company
(Adding an asterisk (*) to the end of the beginning of a word will search for all words beginning with that stem, so for example, market* would search for market, marketing, marketed, markets etc)
The advanced search in Business Source Premier would look like this:
Here, you're asking the database to search for articles with the phrase "social media" AND either the words market (also marketing, markets etc) OR promote (also promoting, promotes etc) OR advert (also advertise, advertising etc) AND business OR organisation OR company.
Once you click on the search button, you'll get some results and they be listed in order of relevance - i.e. the more your words or phrases appear in the article, the higher up they will be towards to the top of the list.
On the left-hand side, you can refine your results by selecting peer-review (to make sure they're of a high academic standard), published in the past 5 years (to make sure they're current and up-to-date) and academic journals:
To read an abstract of an article (the article summary), look under the title and you'll see it. This is all you need to read to determine if the article is going to be useful. If it is, then you can open the full text by clicking on the green Access button or the PDF icon.
If you still have lots of results and you want to get more relevant material, you could search for your keywords or phrases in the abstract only. This will mean your words or phrases appear in the article summary, therefore the focus of the paper is on your subject area:
