Databases
Health and Social Care
The list of databases which are most relevant for research in Health and Social Care.
Care Knowledge, Academic Search Complete and King's Fund Library Database contain publications written by professionals for professionals (trade publications). Other databases mainly cover academic research (i.e. scholarly publications).
Use Google Scholar (guide) to searc across university databases for scholarly publications.
Business
The list of databases which are most relevant for research in Business Management.
For market research and statistics:
Industry profiles, country reports and company profiles.
UK market trends, companies, industries and countries.
Market research data on industries, economies, consumers and companies.
International market data: trends, companies, industries, countries.
Use Google Scholar (guide) for searching across all university databases containing scholarly publications.
Google Scholar
Google Scholar is a specialist search engine for scholarly publications, mostly - academic journal articles.
To link Google Scholar to your university account: select the hamburger menu (top left corner) - select Settings - select Library Links - enter/select London Metropolitan University - Save.
Search techniques
Databases respond well to the following search techniques:
Use search terms (e.g. important words or phases), not sentences or questions.
Combine search terms using search operators (AND, OR, NOT), e.g. sole trader AND legal obligations.
Use truncation (* = substitute for any number of characters) to broaden the scope of your search (e.g. searching for market* will return results with market, markets, marketing etc.).
Use phrase search (search for a phrase in speech marks, “…”) if searching for a stable expression, particularly specific terminology or spelling (e.g. searching for “social media marketing” will ignore any results where these three words are not together).
Refining your search results
Databases contain lots of information and searches usually retrieve many results. You may wish to reduce the number of results by refining your search. Below is an example of how to refine search results:
Enter your search terms. Think carefully about which words you use as this will affect the results you retrieve (synonyms, alternative spellings etc.).
We recommend restricting your search to full-text documents and altering the date range.
You may wish to further limit your results by publication.
Remember, all databases will look different because they have different user interfaces, but you search them all in a similar way.
Databases are collections of publications. Some specialise in academic research publications (scholarly articles and conference papers), others specialise in market research (market analysis, data and statistics).
A full list of electronic resources provided by London Metropolitan University.
A video demonstrating how to use the London Metropolitan University Business databases.
A video demonstrating how to use resources from the Health and Social Care subject guide.
Subject guides help you understand which research resources are useful to you. Click here to access the London Metropolitan University Library subject guides.