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Mount Royal University

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Develop your search

Trying different keywords and using synonyms is important when searching. For example, one topic could be searched a number of ways:

corporate scandal reputation
"crisis management" businesses
(reputation or damage) company scandal 
"customer loyalty" scandal

communication generational differences
millennials seniors communication
audience communication business generations
marketing communication generation
generational communication styles differences

customer communication strategy
technical communication business customers
communicate non technical customers
telecommunications customer marketing
effective B2C communication

Resources to help: The differences between Scholarly/Popular/Trade publications and Is this scholarly?

Below are two different ways to try searches to find academic articles (and trade publications):

I. Search every database at once

Advanced Search

This is the same search box that is on the Library homepage. Once you've done a search, you can change the type of your results by clicking the filters on the right.

  • Check off Articles under the Resource Type filter to just see both popular and scholarly resources.
  • Check off Peer-Reviewed Journals under the Availability filter to find scholarly articles. Select Available online to retrieve full-text articles. 
  • Limit by publication date by using the Creation Date filter
  • Find related articles by clicking on the red arrows (when available)
  • Use the Advanced Search link to open an advanced search box for more precise searching

Here are direct links to good sources that are limited online but you can access free via the Library:
Globe and Mail - Canadian
Harvard Business Review - a great source on HR concepts and solutions. Search example: JN "Harvard Business Review" and flextime
plus
Google News provides access to credible non-scholarly articles.  

II. Google Scholar

If you find one good article make sure to "chain" by clicking Cited by and Related articles below its summary.
Does not include magazines or trade publications. 
The Advanced Search is found by clicking the menu icon (top left).
Besides providing links to articles in MRU databases, Google Scholar links to online repositories which contain articles the author has been allowed to upload.  Academia.edu and ResearchGate are among the repositories searched by Google Scholar. Double-check legitimacy of all sources that are not "Full Text@MRU".
To set up off-campus follow Menu Icon --> Settings --> Library Links. 

Manage and cite your research

There are a number of free citation managers that help with saving research. Two of the more popular are:

​Mendeley www.mendeley.com
     Very useful if your research is mainly pdfs. It is recommended to get both the desktop and browser versions.  You can drag-and-drop pdfs into the desktop version which also has a Word plugin that will automatically insert in-text citations and create a bibliography. The browser version has a web importer that allows you to import web pages.  "Sync" the desktop and browser versions to access Mendeley anywhere in the world. Files and folders can be shared with other users.  The desktop version is installed on most MRU lab & library computers. Create a "Group" to share research (3 members maximum).

Zotero www.zotero.org
     Useful if much of your research is in html format. Has most of the same features as Mendeley. 

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Geoff Owens
Contact:
Email: gowens@mtroyal.ca
Phone: 403.440.7737
Office: EL4471S