Business Research Guides 

Finding information on a corporation from an organizational behavior perspective is not as straightforward as locating information on finance, products or market share. While some strictly business resources like OneSource, can be enormously helpful, they must be approached differently. Moreover, researching organizational behavior requires using academic database such as PsychInfo or Social Sciences Citation Index.

This guide focuses on how to use both types of databases to retrieve information on organizational behavior/HR issues - which include motivation, compensation plans, social influence, group dynamics, and culture/socialization processes, in a specific firm. The name of any corporation can be substituted for companyname in the examples that follow.

Business Perspective
Academic Perspective

Business Perspective
Approaching primarily business resources from an organizational behavior perspective: (electronic resources are complementary goods, to be as thorough as possible, one needs to search all of them)

Onesource Click on News and Reports and Advanced Search to search by company name and choose the Business Topics tab to find articles on subjects such as leadership management.

Lexis-Nexis Academic is a full-text news and information service that provides access to hundreds of newspapers, magazines and more. Search for OB related topics in a particular company by typing companyname in the first search box and then use the other boxes to search for articles that contain multiple uses of terms such as compensation or corporate culture.

Factiva Use the examples on the page to zero in on topics by company name. For example try Microsoft and atleast5(compensation) .

Business Source Complete (EBSCO) and ABI Inform (Proquest) Are comprehensive, business periodical databases that also include scholarly journals. To search by company name in both databases choose Advanced Search and use the drop-down menu, and then add topics such as ethics. Each resource provides the ability to choose between trade-press and scholarly (peer reviewed) journals.

Academic Perspective
Mining for more information from academic resources: (most of the time, the resources that follow will not produce results if searched by companyname...use them for a more in-depth analysis of topics related to organizational behavior).
PsychInfo Covers the professional and academic literature in psychology and related disciplines. While PsychInfo doesn't work well by company name, it is highly useful for scholarly articles on corporate culture. For example, searching for the phrase accounting firms brings up citations to articles related to psychology in this type of organization. Look for SFX in search results to link to full text resources (when available).

SSRN (Social Science Research Network) Each of SSRN's networks encourages the early distribution of research results by publishing submitted abstracts and by soliciting abstracts of top quality research papers around the world. This database can be used to get the academic point of view on a topic even before it appears in journal articles.

Social Sciences Citation Index (Web of science) Provides access to current and retrospective bibliographic information, author abstracts, and cited references found in 1,700 of the world’s leading scholarly social sciences journals. Search example: Use PsychInfo to search for articles on accounting firms. One of the articles retrieved by this search is by Laura Empson from the journal Human Relations.

To find journal articles that have referred to Empson's article go to Social Sciences Citation Index (Web of Science). Click Full Search, check off Social Sciences Index, Cited Reference Search (a purple box near the bottom of the page), type EMPSON L in the Cited Author box, click Look Up. Click on the article from HUM RELAT (the journal abbreviation) to learn which articles have cited this work or to see the resources Empson used to write the article. text here.