Databases
Databases are specialist collections of publications. Some specialise in academic research publications (scholarly articles and conference papers), and others - in market research (market analysis, data and statistics).
A full list of electronic resources from Ulster University.
USearch is a tool which searches most university databases simultaneously. It can be used to find scholarly articles, trade (professional) and other publications. See also USearch v. Google Scholar.
Search techniques
Most databases respond to the following search techniques:
Use search terms (search term = one concept, thing; e.g. pricing, dynamic pricing), not sentences or questions.
Use AND, OR, NOT (always in capitals) to combine search terms, e.g. price AND demand.
UUe 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 (take a phrase in speech marks, “…”) if searching for a stable expression, particular 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 a lot of publications. You may wish to reduce the number of results by refining your search with facets (filters) normally found on the left-hand side of the screen.
They may allow you to limit your results by the date of publication, type (journal article, report etc.) etc.
Databases may look different, but they operate roughly in the same way.