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Business

Access QC Libraries' business research resources.

General Research Process

  • Starting with a research topic
  • Formulating research question(s)
  • Finding literature relevant to the research topic/question(s)

            - APA Citation Style Guide

              * APA Style electronic resources (official)

              * APA Formatting and Style Guide (The Owl at Purdue)

            - MLA Citation Style Guide

              * The MLA Style Center

              * MLA Formatting and Style Guide (The Owl at Purdue)

Gathering Keywords

What is your research topic or research question(s)? Generally, a research starts with a general topic in which you are interested. For example, you may be interested in one of following topics:

  • Captains of Industry: Dead or Alive
  • FIRE economy
  • Transportation/Hospitality/Courier Service
  • Special Topics/Current Events
  • High Tech Industry

If you need more background information about a topic, you can find reference resources via:

OneSearch (Filter your results by Resource Type "Reference Entries")

Gale eBooks

Business Source Complete (EBSCO)

In the meantime, you may need to think about what research question(s) you may present based on the topic. To formulate a research question about your topic, you may need to read more literature relevant to your topic. 

To find literature or resources (i.e., scholarly articles, newspaper articles, e-books, etc.) relevant to your topic, you can do a brainstorm to generate some keywords for searching. In addition to the concept(s) of your topic, the keywords can be the terms related to the concept(s) in your topic, for example:

  • The synonyms of the topic concept(s)
  • Hierarchical concepts related to the topic concept(s) 
  • Contextual terms or background terms gathered from a background reading

** Tips – take notes to gather keywords when you're brainstorming, reading and searching.

** Research guides for Industry/Company Research

Databases for Research Topics

CQ Researcher includes current, hot topic reports providing unbiased coverage of health, social trends, criminal justice, international affairs, education, the environment, technology, and the economy.

Opposing Viewpoints covers controversial topics and includes thousands of pro and con articles, topic overviews, primary documents, academic journal and newspaper articles, court case overviews, statistical tables, charts, graphs, podcasts, web sites, and images.

Nexis Uni offers pages with curated news, featured publications and relevant court cases for Political Science, Business and Criminal Justice majors.