Business Strategy Development Course Guide

Create a list of search terms from your assignment or reading materials to have ready before you open Credo Reference (or any database or Google).

Stick to simple keywords or phrases:

• organization; organizational
• organization chart; organizational structure
• NAICS
• revenue
• income
• profit; profit and loss; P & L
• manage, manager, management
• operations
• marketing
• accounting
• consumer trends
• goods and services
• supply and demand
• centralization
• decentralization

  Advanced Search Strategy - Boolean Search

Combine search terms. Use the Advanced Search tool with multiple boxes.

EXAMPLES:

• profit AND loss
  • finds results with both search terms
  • narrows results
• (income OR revenue) AND expense
  • finds results for either search term specific to climate change
  • place the OR terms in parenthesis as a signal to the database to search variations on the similar concepts
  • expands results
• COBRA NOT snake
  • finds results for COBRA the health insurance program and eliminates results about snakes

  Advanced Search Strategy - Truncation

EXAMPLES:

• manage*
  • finds articles than contain words beginning with the root "manage" -  manager, manages, managerial, management, etc.
    • efficient search strategy -  do one search rather than many