University of Essex
The Albert Sloman Library
Database Guide
Business Source Complete
Business Source Complete (BSC) is a major source of information in business, management, and marketing, related subjects such as finance, accounting, and economics, as well as other fields, notably current affairs.
It includes the full text of nearly 9000 serials, with long runs of over 350 academic journals - Accounting review, Journal of finance, Harvard business review, Academy of Management journal, etc.
BSC also contains country surveys from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), Global Insight, ICON, and CountryWatch organisations. These provide economic and political overviews for the countries of the world.
From Datamonitor there are industry profiles, providing market research information for a variety of industries globally, and many of the reports also cover specific countries or regions. The most recent Datamonitor company profiles are also available on BSC.
1. Accessing BSC
BSC is available from the E-Resource and Database menu on The Albert Sloman Library website.
Search for BSC as Resource Name or selection from the alphabetical list and then click on the title to access.
N.B. This database can be accessed from either on- or off-campus. See also the Guide to Accessing E-Resources page on the website for further login information.
2. Beginning your search
BSC offers a choice of Basic or Advanced search. Regardless of the search terms you enter, Basic search will automatically search the following fields: authors, subjects, keywords, title, abstract (summary). Advanced search enables you to combine search terms from a wide range of fields in addition to the default fields listed above; for example these include: geographic terms, people, companies, and products. For most purposes Basic search is quite adequate.
2.1. Constructing a search
In Basic search mode enter your search term(s) in the search box. You can use the Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT in your search, and you can include phrases. Examples:
Ethiopia AND Pankhurst
Vietnam AND Exchange rate
BSC also allows truncation and wild card searches, e.g.
Corporat* AND Strategic management (searches for Corporate, Corporation, Corporations)
Organi?ation (searches for Organisation, Organization)
2.2. Limiting your search
BSC is an enormous database, so you should be quite specific in your choice of search terms.
In addition, the search screen allows you to limit your search in many ways, for example, by displaying full-text results only, also by date, by type of publication (e.g. academic journal), document type (e.g. book review), and so on.
Moreover, having done a search, you can then narrow your results by subject, by clicking on any relevant subject headings that appear in the left-hand window.
2.3. Alternative searches
Apart from the keyword search facility described above, you can search a number of other files;
Publications - if you wish to limit your search to articles within a specific journal.
Company profiles - the full text of the most recent Datamonitor company profiles. Just type in the name of the company you are interested in.
Thesaurus - a controlled language search using BSC subject headings. This may be useful if you are not sure what search terms to use, or if your own keywords produce too few results.
Cited references - type the name of an author, or title of an article, and BSC will list all the articles citing that author or title. This is a useful facility to use if you want to know what sort of impact an author or article has made, and when searching for related articles.
3. Displaying your results
Results are displayed in brief format, in date order (most recent first), ten to a page, as a default setting. If preferred, you can resort results alphabetically by source title, author, or relevance. You can also click on Preferences in the top right corner to choose how many results per page you want, and whether you want detailed, brief, or title only, records displayed.
Clicking on the title gives full bibliographic details of the document, and an abstract (summary) where one is available. Where full text is available, simply click on the HTML and/or PDF full-text link to open the document.
4. Exporting your results
Exporting options are given at the top of the document when you open it. Documents can be printed off, saved to disk, or emailed, by following the relevant instructions on-screen.
Selected documents can also be saved to a folder and looked at later. To look at documents in future sessions you will need to click on the link to Sign into my EBSCOhost.
5. Getting help
Online help can be accessed from within BSC by clicking on the Help button at the top right of the screen, and selecting the relevant section.
If you require further assistance in using this database, please contact:
Sandy Macmillen
Telephone extension: 3181
E-mail: amacmi
If you experience technical difficulties when using this database, please contact:
Caroline Checkley
Telephone extension: 3181
E-mail: checkc
See also the Guide to Accessing E-Resources page on the Library website.
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