Introducing Business Source Ultimate - your new business information searching interface

Hi, students! 

My name is Hannah Porter, and I'm the Faculty Librarian for Business.  And in this video I just want to take you through our Business Searching interface.  

So I'm on my Library website here in my Subject area and on all of the Business pages there is a Getting Started section. And in here you can find our business searching interface.  So if I click through to access.  This database is much smaller than our main Discovery interface. It is searching our subscriptions, Business Source Ultimate, and EconLit for economics.  So because it's only searching those two databases, you should get much more relevant and fewer results if you're looking for something on business. 

So let's just explore some of the differences between this interface and Discovery. The first thing is on the home page here you've got lots of options to browse. So this is really nice.  So if you want to have a look for particular journals that you know are highly recommended. Let's go into the Management journal section. 

You can see here coming up the Academy of Management Journals.  A lot of these are really top journals. And you can have a look through and a browse. So that can be very helpful, just to have a look at what articles are being published in particular areas.  You've also got our business magazines here. So you can see we have things like Forbes and Fortune and the very popular Harvard Business Review.  Those also sit in our subscription, and you can click through and browse the latest articles from those magazines as well.

If we scroll down on the home page, this is surfacing some of the really good business content that sits in this database. It's not just about articles anymore, it's got company and industry profiles and all sorts of things.  So you can see here there's actually case studies, which I'm often asked about. If we click on the link to case studies, say I wanted to find something about Apple. If I just type that in, it's already defaulted to case studies. And you can see here are all sorts of journal articles that actually have a case study of something to do with Apple in them.  You can also browse by country profiles and company profiles, and you can search for those as well.  And you've got the nice SWOT analysis here. So this is really helpful. 

But what you can also do if you're interested in a particular company.  If I come up to the top here. Say I'm interested in Tesco.  If I just type that in because this is a business database, immediately the company profile comes up.  And if we explore the Tesco topic, you've got the top competitors listed, you've got the industry reports related you straight into the Swot analysis for it here and more information.  So that's quite a nice feature, if you quickly want to find information on a large company.  And then have a look through - there's usually popular topics and other things coming up.

So the homepage is a little bit different and allows you to browse and surface business content a bit more easily.  A couple of things to notice about this database, is it is defaulted to search outside of our library collections.  So you will find things that we don't have access to.  Which means I'll show you the options you can turn on to ensure you're just looking for within our subscription.

So let's think about a search. I could build a search.  I could go for something like leadership and employee motivation.  So you can see I've put in leadership is my main term connected it with AND and then "employee motivation" in quotation marks.  So it looks as a phrase - that's a traditional library search. However you can do something different.  You could say does leadership motivate employees?

So let's ask it an actual question.  Now normally you would get no results if you do this, but what we can do is turn on the natural language search here.  And it would take your search and it will translate that into that more traditional search I did before.  So if we just click on show query here, can you see it's looking for leadership and motivate or motivation and employee or staff or worker.  So actually a slightly more expanded search than I might have done.  But if you struggle with all of the ANDs and ORs, then sometimes that can be quite helpful.  

What I would immediately suggest in this database, if you're using it to find journal articles, click on Linked Full Text, which means we have the article, and click on Peer Reviewed as those are the top quality ones.  And then you can obviously limit maybe past five years.  And then we'll get all of our peer reviewed articles coming up. You can see the figure here is a lot lower than you'd see in our Discovery service.

Many things are the same. So you've got your link out to the full text of the article, or you might see something that says Access options.  And then you've got options online for how you access it depending on where it is.  Or it might say link to full text, If it's going to take you out to a different provider.  

There's a nice AI insights feature here. So traditionally, we've used this little summary, this abstract, to help us decide which journal articles to read.  I still think that's really helpful, but if you want to, you can generate the AI insights and then you get an AI summary of that article.  So between those two, you should be able to decide which of these articles you want to have a look at.  Then you can go off and access the full text. And I would also make sure that you bookmark the article here.

So the same as Discovery, EBSCO will ask you to sign in and create your own account. And then you can save everything onto the system. And anything you've bookmarked will come up over here so that you can look through and make sure that you've got a record of all the journal articles that you've used.  Now I'm just going to take off peer reviewed for the moment.  Because as well as journal article content, you can see here, there's also some news. So there's business news surfacing here. We saw some of those business magazines on the homepage.  You also might find some reports.  

Okay, so those are the basics.  But let's explore some of the more advanced things that we can do. So if I go into my advanced search here, I can build a traditional search.  

Let's go again. Go for leadership and "employee motivation". Now, maybe I want leadership styles: I can put an asterisk on the end and that will find leadership style or leadership styles.  It finds any alternative letters that come after it so useful for plurals and things or management styles.

So again building my search a little bit and employee motivation and what you've got.  And here are the options for Publications and Subjects which can be very helpful.  So under Subjects, this is the Business thesaurus.  It's you can see here, it says Subjects authority. So this is the list of controlled vocabulary terms that this database uses. So if I type in leadership and I click on the link, you'll actually see all the different terms here that this database uses.  So maybe I don't want leadership styles. Maybe I want to be looking at authentic leadership inclusive leadership.  You know you've got all these different options here. So you tick the ones that you want and you add them into your search.   And they would then appear here. And that DE means it's searching a descriptor, a subject term.

You can also choose a particular publication.  So, you know, say, you know, you want something from the Academy of Management journals.  If we type that in, we can select the ones that we want here, and we can add them into the search. And then it would just search within those specific journals.  So I'm just going to try on my descriptor search here just to see how many articles we've got on those two descriptors.  Now there's more filters available.  But under all filters here you've got other options.

So you can add in subject terms again here if you want.  You can also have a look under publication. You can see here where the articles are coming from and you can target specific ones.  You can also limit to Company or Industry. So that again can be quite helpful for reducing the number of articles you're finding.  So do have a look at those filters.

The final couple of things I wanted to show you is if you've done a good search and you want to stay up to date under here, you can save your search and create an alert. And that will go up here under your alerts and you'll be emailed when there's new content that matches that.  And the same thing if we go into the Publications authority here: if I search for the journal that I want, it's remembered my search and before.  If we select the particular journal, you can also set an alert here for a particular journal.

So if you wanted to know when new issues are released and new articles, you can create alert here and it will do that for you.  I would suggest that you alert on full text only. So that means that the article will actually be available to you, but you can create that alert. And then that was set over here in your alerts. 

So, I hope that's given you an introduction to our new Business Searching interface.  Remember, it is searching Business Source Ultimate and EconLit - you can browse nicely from the home page. Now you can do a quick search either using terms or using that natural language option. You've got your advanced search option for building comprehensive searches, looking at subject terms and looking at publications.

If you need any more help using this interface, then do let me know, and I hope you find it really useful for your studies.