MRU Library Website: Business: HRES 5101

Develop your search

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

employee recognition "post secondary"
employee reward system (college or university)
"higher education" rewards staff (issues or policy or culture)
"employee fringe benefits"

respectful workplace effective
"interpersonal conflict" trends
abusive workplace behaviour "human resources" trends

marijuana "human resources" canada
marijuana workplace colorado

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

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

I. HR-related article databases (trade & scholarly)

ABI/INFORM Collection This link opens in a new window
Journal articles, country and industry reports, and downloadable data in business and economics.
Business Source Complete (Ebsco) This link opens in a new window
Full text journal articles, covering business management, economics, banking, finance, accounting.

_{Harvard Business Review restricts the use of their 500 most popular articles in EBSCOhost. The full-text of these articles is ‘read only’ and cannot be printed, downloaded or linked to. LibrarySearch links will not navigate to the full-text but these articles can be accessed for personal use by searching within Business Source Complete.}
Access to this resource is funded by Alberta Advanced Education through the Lois Hole Campus Alberta Digital Library.
Conference Board of Canada This link opens in a new window
Research documents produced by the Conference Board of Canada and Conference Board Inc, including reports, briefings, economic periodicals and recorded webinars. Please create an account in order to access documents off campus.

Use the first two databases to find trade and scholarly sources. You can apply limits for Trade Publications, Scholarly Articles, and by Date.
After conducting a search change the list of results from Date/Most recent first to Relevance.

LibrarySearch

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

III. Google Scholar & other databases with good citation analysis

Several other excellent resources can be used to find scholarly material. The three below also provide a way to find articles and then use citation chaining to find more. Citation chaining refers to searching backwards and forwards in time to find additional relevant resources.

Google Scholar This link opens in a new window
Google Scholar provides searching of scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources. This MRU specific link connects users to items available full text via MRU.

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.
To set up off-campus follow Menu Icon --> Settings --> Library Links.

Scopus This link opens in a new window
A large abstract and citation database of research literature with links to full text resources available from MRU. Records with references go back to 1996, pre-1996 records go back to 1884.

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.