BizResearch

Keeping ahead - with RSS alerts from Business Source Complete

Keep up to date with an industry, topic, company or a specific journal's coverage using the alerting options in Business SOurce Complete.

Business Source Complete is our key database for full text journals in all disciplines of business, including marketing, management, MIS, POM, accounting, finance and economics. But did you know that it can provide a tailored alerting service?

Just run a search in the usual way and then click on the RSS : Create alert for this search

If you want to know when the latest issue of a journal is available enter the name of the journal and click on the publications radio button.If you wish to receive RSS feeds click on the RSS icon and you will see the syndication feed link.

Business Source Complete is available to all faculty, current students and staff of the London Business School.

Picture: FlickR; Creative Commons:Robert Winder

Get closer - use proximity operators in your searching!

Get closer - use proximity operators!

Although databases usually offer sophisticated indexing to help accurate searching, you often need to use free text terms too.

Two of our most popular and useful databses: Factiva and Business Source Complete allow you to search for words as phrases (you can put them in double quotes to be sure.) But did you realise that you can search for words that are close to one another although they can be separated by several words. Alter the number to indicate how many words apart you think might apply.

If you want to find:

• market share  or
• share of the organic food market    or
• share of the disposable paper products market 

Use -Business Source Complete: market n5 share . The words can be up to five words apart and in any order. To keep the words in the given order use: w5 instead

In Factiva use: market near5 share to operate in the same way and w/5 to keep the order entered.

You may also know that the truncation device is an asterisk. So invest*  will get investment, investments, investing, investor etc.

End

Picture: Creative Commons:Flickr, Caro's Lines

Copernic - almost the answer to a researcher's prayer

 

Copernic - cover more of the web!

Despite the range of databases made available to students at the London Business School there are still many occasions when you have to search the Web. Most of us will just "Google it!" but have you tried Copernic?

Copernic makes it easier and faster for people to find information by gathering the most relevant results from the best search engines on the Internet.

There are different levels of product available and I only have access to the free Copernic Agent basic which:

..gives you the ability to cover more of the Web and to get relevant, high quality results from more than 90 search engines grouped into categories. From a single query, Copernic Agent Basic gives you better search engine results by consulting multiple search engines at once, combining their results, removing duplicates and keeping only the very best of the information gathered from queried search engines.

Highly recommeded - when you need to search the web thoroughly.

Harvard Business Review or Harmful Algae?

Article Finder - locate journal articles

Enter the name of a known journal and the sytem checks if you are able to access the full text electronically. It also checks our print collect.

There is an option to browse by subject/category or you can try looking for any journal titles containing a given word.

Students, staff and faculty - don't give up if we do not have the journal - we can obtain a specific article for you on inter-library loan. To place an order using the request items option on the Library catalogue home page.

Portal>Library>Top search Tools>Article Finder

World Book Day - today!

Books think for me.
Last Essays of Elia (1833) Lamb, Charles  1775–1834 (m.)
English writer

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.
Johnson, Samuel  1709–1784 Boswell Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) 6 April 1775

Find these quotations and many more go to Portal>Library>A-Z of Databases>Oxford Reference

Read an E-Book!  - Our electronic books are listed in our Library catalogue.

In portal go the the library catalogue and search your topic or author. Click on the FULL CATALOGUE DETAILS and you will see the link to the electronic version.

Financial Advisor - League Tables

Financial Advisors - League Tables from Thomson Deals

If you need to know where a financial advisor ranks in completed M&A deals over the last year, or the top ten advisors for global high yield bonds in the last quarter you can find the answer easily using Thomson Deals.  Go to Portal>Library>A-Z List of databases>Thomson Deals. (Do not forget you can add it to your favourites in Portal for quick access later.) It is available on and off campus.

Top Tip

You will see two tabs (top left) click on the Deals tab. There are three categores: M&A, Equity and Bonds. Changing these options will take you initially to the overview page This includes a range of useful tables with clickable links for more detail. Scroll down the page for the ranked advisors.

If you need further ranking data you will see a list of options below the menu tab - click on the one called League Tables.

For a quick guide on how to use Thomson deals go to: Portal>Library>Help and Advice>Helpsheets for databases.

Picture - Creative Commons - Flickr - hughes.leglise@gmail.com

Wassail! Wassail! All over the town

What is Wassailing?

Find out about the origin of the word, the traditions involved, and the food and drink associated with this old English custom which: "... involves lively and noisy festivities involving the drinking of plentiful amounts of alcohol; revelry."

(From The Oxford Dictionary of English (2nd edition revised) in English Dictionaries & Thesauruses)

Wassail! wassail! all over the town,
Our toast it is white and our ale it is brown;
Our bowl it is made of the white maple tree;

Oxford Reference is available as one of our databases in Portal. It provides a reference library covering a huge range of topics: art, languages, science, technical and medical dictionaries, quotations, religion, finance, statistics, folklore, religion and much more...

A periodic table of visualization methods

A periodic table of visualization methods

This brings together a wide range of visualisation tools which have been divided into six categories:

• Data visualization
• Information visualization
• Concept visualization
• Strategy visualization
• Metaphor visualization
• Compound visualization

Here you can look at examples in each category - so if you want to know what: an Ishikawa or fishbone map looks like or a Toulin map, or a dilemma diagramme or a parameter ruler or....many more.

It is both potentially useful and great fun. Take a look at it at: visual literacy.org

 

Database tips for Amadeus/Fame/Osiris

Using Amadeus/Fame/Osiris

The Bureau van Dijk databases provide company financial data covering the geographic regions of Europe, USA and the Pacific. Search using a variety of criteria including company status, turnover, etc; compile ranked lists of firms and export your records and lists to a spreadsheet (or to a word processor for mail merge)

Top tips:

• Try using the Expert search option (to the left of the initial search box). It is easier to navigate than the basic search option and provides a greater selection of search categories.
• To clear a search and start a new one click on the Trash icon (top right hand corner).
• To download your results click on the Export button. Use the FORMAT option to customise your data output. Then choose the package you wish to export data to (e.g. Excel or Word), and then name the file that you wish to save to.

Global access is available to both staff and students via the Portal. Alumni access is restricted to the PCs located in the library.