LibGuides: Marketing: Using Research Databases

Searching Marketing Literature

-You will generally be expected to find and use scholarly sources

-Scholarly articles, also called academic journal articles, are a primary part of the professional literature in marketing

-Scholarly articles are rarely found on the open web

-You will be expected to use the WVWC library to find appropriate resources for your work

Selecting Appropriate Library Resources

-know what type of information you need for your research - are you looking for background information on a topic, in-depth scholarly articles, demographic information, company profiles, news reports, statistics?

-familiarize yourself with library's database resources and the types of information they each contain

Developing Search Term Vocabulary

-consider your key words or concepts and write them down

-create a synonym chart to help identify other search terminology that may yield different results

*Marketing Search Terminology Chart*
Original Term	Synonym/Related Term #1	Synonym/Related Term #2
brand choice	brand loyalty	brand preference
consumer behavior	customer loyalty	consumer attitude

Keyword and Phrase Search Techniques

-use "AND" to connect search terms and make your search more narrow (e.g. - Microsoft AND profits)

-use "OR" to broaden search results for terms that are synonyms of each other (e.g. - market research OR consumer research)

-use "NOT" to exclude particular search terms from the results (e.g. - advertising NOT television)

-by placing a search term in quotation marks, you direct the database to do a phrase search rather than a keyword search. The database will search for the exact phrase in the exact order you specify (e.g. - "movie product placement" vs. movie AND product AND placement)

-a wildcard is a symbol that stands in for any letter of the alphabet. The particular wildcard symbol will vary from database to database (check the Help page for more information), but common symbols include *, #, ?, and $. (e.g. - wom#n would find women and woman)

-a truncation symbol is a type of wildcard that will search any number of letters. The most common truncation symbol is a *, but may vary from database to database (e.g. - market* research would find market research as well as marketing research)