MBA: Professional Ethics and Social Responsibility

Search Tips

Advanced Search Skills

Tips that work for most Databases:

-Use AND, OR, and NOT to join keyword terms, versus assuming that the search engine will apply ones you want.
-Use parentheses ( ) to group terms with Boolean terms to distinguish sets of ANDs and ORs.
-Asterisk (*) stands for multiple characters. Most databases only allow * on the end of a term. JStor allows * to stand before, or embedded in a word. EXAMPLE: war* = war, wars, warring, warlord, etc.

-Question marks (?) stand for single character replacement. EXAMPLE: wom?n = woman, women

-Use double quotation marks around a phrase that you want to search exactly as typed. Some databases will ignore "stop words" such as 'a', 'the', etc. regardless of quotation marks.
-Use Author, Title, and Abstract search narrowing to find items more specific to your topic. Be careful when using Abstract because not every article contains one.
Visual Brainstorming:

If you prefer to draw when brainstorming, you may want to draw a concept map. You can do this on paper, a white board, or a smart board. For online resources focused on concept mapping, we recommend Canva.