Library Research Orientation

BSM 471 - Summer 2008

Hector Rodriguez - Encino Campus Library

(818) 501-1615 or hrodrigu@pepperdine.edu

What We'll cover today:

• Tools on the Library Website
• Finding Empirical Peer Reviewed Journal Articles

*Tools on the Library Website http://library.pepperdine.edu
Library Catalog(Pepperdine books)
Request books from other Pepperdine campuses (West LA and Irvine Campuses are currently under construction and books can not be shipped from these locations)
_ Renew your books online_
Interlibrary Loan_get books not available at Pepperdine_
Ask A Librarian_send a question via email or IM_
Journal Search_find out where the full text of an article is located_
_ Especially helpful when Article Linker doesn't work!_

Tips on finding empirical research:
To find articles that report on empirical research, some keywords you might want to use could be: population, study, results, discussion, data, variables, limitations, implications, survey, respondents, or conclusion.

Such terms should be searched as keywords rather than subject terms because they reflect the kind of language used in an article describing empirical research, but they are not the topic or subject of the study.

Empirical (definition):
(from Webster's Online Dictionary)
1 : originating in or based on observation or experience <empirical data>
2 : relying on experience or observation alone often without due regard for system and theory
3 : capable of being verified or disproved by observation or experiment <empirical laws>

Peer Review (definition):
(from Webster's Online Dictionary)
: a process by which something proposed (as for research or publication) is evaluated by a group of experts in the appropriate field

Why should there be peer review?
A common rationale for peer review is that it is rare for an individual author or research team to spot every mistake or flaw in a complicated piece of work. In addition, since reviewers are normally selected from experts in the fields discussed in the article, the process of peer review is considered critical to establishing a reliable body of research and knowledge. Scholars reading the published articles can only be expert in a limited area; they rely, to some degree, on the peer-review process to provide reliable and credible research that they can build upon for subsequent or related research.

Select A Database
Business Source Premier:
Business Source Premier is the industry's most used index of business journals, magazines and other sources, containing abstracts for more than 3,200 business-related periodicals. Business Source Premier contains full text from the most prestigious business journals, including Harvard Business Review (back to 1922), Journal of Marketing (back to 1936), Accounting Review (back to 1926), Journal of Finance (back to 1946), Quarterly Journal of Economics (back to 1904), etc. The database also includes full text from country economic reports, monographs, industry reports, and company profiles for the world's 10,000 largest companies and SWOT analysis.

Emerald Management Xtra 140
Emerald Mangement Xtra 140 includes over 75,000 searchable articles from over 140 Emerald journals.

PsycINFO:
PsycINFO contains nearly 2.3 million citations and summaries of journal articles, book chapters, books, dissertations and technical reports, all in the field of psychology.  It also includes information about the psychological aspects of related disciplines such as medicine, psychiatry, nursing, sociology, education, pharmacology, physiology, linguistics, anthropology, business and law.

Research Library:
Research Library provides access to scholarly journals in the social sciences, humanities, business, health, education and general science. It includes citations and abstracts for over 2,300 journals from 1971 forward. Full-text and/or full-image is available for over 1400 journals from 1986 forward.

ScienceDirect:
Provides indexing and abstracting for over 1,000 scientific, technical and medical journals as well as access to full-text Elsevier journals and titles subscribed to by Pepperdine University Libraries in the following subject collections: Agricultural and Biological Sciences; Business, Management and Accounting; Economics, Econometrics, and Finance; Medicine; Psychology (includes comprehensive clinical psychology); and Social Science.

Follow this path:
Library website/Research Guides/Citation Guides and Grammar
Here you will see several resource pages for APA style citation