Background reading

For an understanding of the issues involved get some background information from

• the Library's Guides to resources for the subject areas related to your topic, such as Commerce, Management, Engineering: these guides mention both print, web and database sources
• General reference resources for wide-ranging encyclopaedias, biographical dictionaries etc.

Library Catalogue

When you have ideas of some lines of inquiry to pursue, use the Library Catalogue to find a books or reports on your topic. A book will have distilled the various arguments around an issue. This material may be in print or electronic form.

For a topic search, use the Keyword (use and,or,not," ") search option.

- your search strategy should include the words you would expect to see in the title or chapter headings, of a potentially useful book;
- use the commands and, or, "", ? to tell the Catalogue system the relationship between the search terms;

teamwork and engineering

tells the system to find every record which includes both of those terms

(teamwork or "team work")

tells the system to find every record which includes either of these terms

- where the search term could be singular or plural, use the truncation symbol ? to find the various endings, eg.

(teamwork? or "team work?") and engineer?

NB. Whenever you use the or command, always put round brackets around the search strategy to indicate that you want one result for any of those search terms.

See ideas on effective searching via the Catalogue.

Databases

Once you know something of the issues surrounding your topic, you will find that some arguments need more supporting material. Look for current or contemporary comment in journal articles, newspaper articles or conference papers. The Library Catalogue does not list individual articles or papers, so you need to use Indexes or Databases
 
Interdisciplinary databases cover a wide range of subject areas and types of material. Some of these sources also link to the full electronic text of articles. Examples include:

Academic search premier, 1985-

Expanded Academic ASAP 1980-

Australia/New Zealand Reference Centre

APA-FT: Australian Public Affairs Full text 1978- with full text 1995-

Factiva  for newspaper articles

from the business literature consider

Business source complete which covers all aspects of business, commerce, management

Emerald for management issues

from the engineering literature try

INSPEC, 1898-  Includes a coverage of issues in manufacturing.

EiCompendex, 1884-  An international coverage of all aspects of engineering

(Note that once you know the name of a database, you can always link to it by searching the database name in the Library Catalogue.)

Finding a copy of an article or paper

Some databases will provide access to the full text of articles, in other cases you will need to check the Library Catalogue, under the journal title, to see if the Library provides access to that journal in print or electronic format.
See Citations: interpreting citation lists if you are uncertain how to distinguish the journal title in a citation.

Can I find this article/paper/report in other libraries?

Search the catalogues of:
Other libraries or the SIAL database.
The Library can get a copy of an article or paper for you at a cost. See Document delivery for costs and procedures.

Presenting results

Report Writing and Referencing