Guides: Marketing: Databases & Journals

Finding Peer-Reviewed Sources in Databases

Peer reviewed sources (also known as scholarly sources) are:

written by experts in the field
reviewed by other experts in the field (hence the peer-reviewed)
intended for an academic audience

While you can find scholarly articles through general search engines, databases contain a feature where you can narrow your results to only scholarly articles.

Marketing Databases

Communication & Mass Media Complete
Supports quality research in areas related to communication and mass media. This includes both CommSearch and Mass Media Articles Index, along with journals in communication, mass media, and closely-related fields of study. Contains indexing and abstracting for more than 570 journals and full text access to over 450 journals.
Business Source Premier
Scholarly business journals and publications covering marketing, management, accounting, finance and economics. Business Source Premier also includes market research reports, industry reports, country reports, company profiles and SWOT analyses.
Nexis Uni
Nexis Uni (previously called LexisNexis Academic) provides access to more than 17,000 news, business and legal sources. To access content on Nexis Uni, they must register themselves by clicking on the “Sign In/Register” link in the top right corner.

Statistics Sources

Sage Data
Provides access to billions of statistical datasets across 16 topical areas, including Business, Education, Health, Criminal Justice and Law.
Statista
Statistics portal integrating statistics and other quantitative data on over 80,000 topics including media, business, finance, politics, and more.

Forming your Search String

The more complicated your question, the less likely a search engine can understand it. To get the best result, identify keywords and like terms to create a search string.

Example research question: How do scandals impact brand perception in American non-profit companies?

Keywords: scandals, brand perception, American non-profit companies

Like terms can include synonyms and also examples of your keywords. If you don't get results from searching your keywords, it doesn't mean that the research doesn't exist. It could mean that the researcher used different language to describe the same topic

scandals: fraud, misconduct, wrongdoing,
brand perception: brand equity, brand attitude
American non-profit companies: US non-profits, North American not-for-profit, nonprofit

Search strings connect your keywords and like terms together for the best results.

Too many results? Use AND to narrow results

scandals AND brand perception AND American non-profit companies

Too few results? Use OR to broaden results

scandals OR misconduct AND brand perception OR brand equity AND American non-profit companies OR US nonprofit OR North American not-for-profit