Library & Archives

A practitioner journal primarily features content written by people who work (practice) in the field, rather than articles written by those who work in academic institutions like a university or college. To find a practitioner journal:

1. Start at the Library home page
2. Click Research Guides, select Business Administration from the menu
3. Select one of the recommended databases for starting your research. In this case, try ABI/Inform Global.
4. When you are off-campus, you will have to sign into the library proxy server using your Laurentian ID. When you sign in successfully, you will be redirected to your research destination.
5. The ABI/Informal Global  search page has a fairly overwhelming set of options, but let's start with a simple search for "decision making". That returns over 650,000 results--way too many! And the results are at the article level, not at the journal level. But you can narrow it down easily from here.
6. On the left-hand side, there is a column that allows you to refine your results. Under this, you can select the Source type. If Trade Journals do not appear as an option, click More 
7. When the box listing selections appears, click Trade publications (and/or Magazines) then Apply to tell the database that you do not want results from academic journals, newspapers, books.

8. This leaves you with over 94,000 results--still a lot! But you can go further.

• At the top of the page, under your original search term, you will see an empty text box next to AND. You can add in a new search term here, such as "management" that will restrict the results to those articles that have both "decision making" and "management" to ensure that the results are in your field of interest (and not, say, "decision making by mice in mazes"). Launching a new search for "decision making" and "management" results in over 75,000 results because you've lost the "Refine results" filter you had previously set. If that number is still too many, keep adding concepts separated by the word AND.  
• Next, if you still have too many, limit your terms to search a specific field, title and subject being the best.

• Add the Trade publications  filter again. Now you're down to around 65,000 results. Still a lot, but you can scan the page counts and publication titles in the first few results to see if there's a journal that might be a good match. For example "Don't be a 'naked baby on a beach.' is published in Directors & Boards, which sounds promising, but is only one page long (p25-25), so probably isn't a good fit.
• However, you can still go further.  You will note that the articles range from 1949 to the present.  Under publicaiton date, limit yourself to the last few years and click Update.

One more thing you can do to make your life slightly easier is to  select the Limit to: Full text option to avoid having to wade through results for which we only have a citation. For real research, you want to see those citations because the library can almost always get you a copy of any article in just a few days through the RACER service, and you don't want to miss out on what might be the best article to support your research--but if this is just an assignment, you can skip that step for expedience.

• Books are extremely valuable resources when doing in-depth research on a topic! Authors have hundreds of pages to give detailed explanations and background information surrounding the various facets of your research interest.
• Using this kind of in-depth information will make it easier to form a research question or thesis statement (or even spark your inspiration)
• The bibliographies found in books are extensive, and will point you to other resources to add to your own resource list.
• Remember: scholars write journal articles under the assumption that you already have a relatively thorough understanding of the topic – this means that you will likely not find the foundational information needed for your topic in the beginning stages of your research process. In this sense, books become indispensable

is a free, web-based citation manager that allows you to: 

• Directly import references from article databases, the library catalogue, e-book collections, etc.
• Manage and organize your references.
• Create a bibliography.
• Share your references with others
• Add in-text citation and a bibliography directly into your assignment 

To enable Zotero's Library Lookup service to find full-text documents licensed by Laurentian University, set Edit->Preferences->Advanced->General->Resolver to https://omni.laurentian.ca/openurl/01OCUL_LU/01OCUL_LU:OMNI

Getting started with Zotero:

• Follow the Managing Citations guide for Laurentian
• Contact the librarian supporting your faculty
• Consult Zotero's documentation, such as the Quick Start Guide or Tutorials