Kresge Research Guides: Company, Industry and Consumer Research for Business Planning: Articles & Books

Article searching tips

There are many sources available to you at Ross and at the University Libraries for articles, including academic journals, major news sources, and industry or trade press, depending on your needs on many different projects. When doing business research, you can't go wrong with some searching in Business Source Complete, or using the Google Scholar search with links to the Ross and UM resources.

An article search can often turn up all kinds of information on your company or industry and articles are a great source for independent discussion of your company's involvement in social issues. Local and regional news sources may also have additional information about your company.

Article searching tips:

Be creative with your keywords describing your issue or topic.
- Search on terms like "business model canvas", "lean startup" or "customer discovery" and use quotation marks or other database-specific commands to search by exact phrase.
Try searching by company name or the name of a key executive and use the fields in the databases to search by company, industry or topic.
Be on the lookout for research articles related to your topic--look for the data section to see what resources the authors cite.
Search early and search often!

Article Databases

Business Source Complete
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Business Source Complete contains articles from thousands of newspapers, trade publications, and key business magazines such as the Harvard Business Review. It also contains papers from leading academic journals across all major business disciplines.
- Help Guide
Use policy: When using material from this database in reports and presentations, vendor contract requirements dictate that you must include the phrase, "Used with permission of Business Source Complete."
Factiva
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Originally a joint-venture between Dow Jones and Reuters, Factiva contains articles from thousands of international newspapers and key business magazines such as the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Forbes, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Reuters Newswires, Dow Jones Newswires, and thousands of others.
Technical notes: Downloads are limited to 100 documents per PDF.
Use policy: When using material from this database in reports and presentations, vendor contract requirements dictate that you must include the phrase, "Used with permission of Factiva." Traders may not use this database.
ABI/INFORM Collection
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ABI/INFORM contains articles from thousands of newspapers and key business magazines such as the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Barron’s, the Economist, and the New York Times. It also contains papers from leading academic journals across all major business disciplines.
- Help Guide
Email and RSS feed alerts available.

Google Scholar Search

Google Scholar provides a familiar interface and method for searching scholarly literature across a wide array of disciplines and sources. You can find articles, theses, books, abstracts and other documents that are buried in Kresge Library databases or stored in academic institutional repositories around the world.

Google Scholar is not Google. Google Scholar is not searching the web at large, but a set of trusted resources that specifically focus on scholarly literature. Google Scholar is a good place to start to get a sense of where the scholarly literature on your topic is located.

You can also set Google Scholar up to link directly into the Library databases that you have access to as a Ross and UM student.