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Source Issues
- Free v. fee
Some sources are free to everyone on the Internet. Others are available for a fee, such as so many dollars per article or so much for a particular report.
In some cases, the library subscribes to sources that are not free to everyone, and they are as a result free to UNI students and employees.
Sources that are not free may be available through the library Interlibrary Loan service. There's a link on the left side of the home page.
- Suitability of a source for a given assignment
After finding a source that deals with the company or market you are studying, consider whether the source type is good enough to use.
Does the professor allow the use of the source type?
Does the source provide authoritative, objective information?
Search Issues
- Company name searches
Different companies can have very similar names - make sure you're researching the right company. If a company name has unusual features such as dashes, asterisks, or unusual spacing, watch out.
Different databases handle such issues in different ways; so if there's a dash in a company name, for example, you may need to try the search with and without the dash.
- Brand name versus product type versus company name
Keep in mind the difference between brand names, product types, and companies: Budweiser, beer, Anheuser-Busch
- Searching for exact phrases to get more precise results
Many databases requires putting words in quotes to retreive exact phrase: "target market"
- Narrowing and broadening searches
Often can narrow search by requiring that search terms be in article titles, or broaden search by looking in full text of articles, for example
- Where to get search terms?
Your own knowledge of topic, terms used by professor in lectures and class documents, the textbook, terms used by authors of documents you like, and in business subject thesauri
