ADMS 3430: Human Resources Planning
This guide introduces students to resources of relevance to Human ResourcePlanning available through York University Libraries. It highlights some of the key research tools available but it is not intended as a comprehensive list of sources. This course guide is divided into the following Sections:- Key Library Resources
- Finding Company Information
- Finding Articles on your Topic
- Citing Your Sources
- HR Planning: Web Resources
Key Library Resources
Library Homepage: Access York's library system, including the library catalogue and a link to the Bronfman Business Library homepage.
Guide to Company Research : The Bronfman Business Library has developed a guide for conducting company research, including access to key research tools.
Class Handout: Click to access the handout from the in-class library session.
PowerPoint Slides: Click here to view a slide show of the PowerPoint presentation from the in-class library session, and click here to get a printable handout of the slides.
Finding Company Information
SEDAR: This website provides access to documents filed by public companies with Canadian securities regulatory authorities. All Canadian Public companies and investment funds are required to file their documents with SEDAR. Key documents for your company research may include:
- the company's annual report
- financial statements
- management information circulars
- notices of meetings, and
- news releases.
Marketline: Provides secondary analysis of companies. This database is divided into Company, Industry, and Country sections including 10,000 company profiles covering international, U.S, and Canadian companies, 1000 company SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis, 2500 market profiles, more than 50 company profiles, over 150 industry rankings, and news comments and analysis.
Mergent Online: Provides information for over 10,000 U.S. public companies and almost 20,000 non-U.S. public companies. Company records include detailed business descriptions, corporate histories and financial statements.
In addition, Company websites are a valuable source of information on company policies and practices. Look for sections such as "investors" or "shareholders".
Finding Articles on your Topic
Different Types of Business Articles
The following section is a description of the different kinds of articles, and when to use them in your research.
Academic/Scholarly:- Published in academic journals
- Written by academics (professors) and researchers
- Typically focus on original research
- Often undergo a peer-reviewed process (in which other experts from the field review the item for academic quality)
- Have a publication lag time due to the long editorial process
- May appear in a scholarly journal generally dedicated to the area of business e.g. Administrative Science Quarterly, or to a sub-field within business e.g. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology
- Use specialized language specific to the field
- Contain extensive citations and bibliographies
- Normally appear with plain covers, few or no pictures or advertisements
When to Use The Article:
- If an academic or scholarly perspective is required
- If original research is sought
- Where academic theory and frameworks are needed
- When a review of the academic literature on a business topic is needed
- If a professor has specifically stipulated that only scholarly articles may be used
Trade/ Industry:
- Published in trade or professional journals or magazines e.g. HR Professional, Autoweek etc.
- Target members of a specific business, industry or organization
- Written by practitioners or journalists who cover the field
- Often published by an association or organization
- Valued for currency
- Typically focus on industry trends, new products or techniques, and organizational news
- Editorial review quite common, may contain short bibliographies
- Often printed on glossy paper with pictures, charts, and illustrations and some focused advertising
When to Use The Article:
- When a practitioner perspective is being sought
- Where industry, company, or market research is being conducted with an emphasis on currency
- If information on best practices, recent developments or other information relating to a particular profession or trade is being sought
Popular Business:
- Target audience is general public and/or business professionals.
- Focus on general business information especially current trends and news, e.g., Canadian Business; Forbes
- Often published weekly or monthly, and cover business news events and recent developments.
When to Use The Article:
- If general background information is required on a business topic and information source need not be academic, specialized, or in-depth in focus
- When currency is important
Newspaper/Newswire:
- Short articles written by business columnists/journalists
- Focus on current news in business, e.g. Wall Street Journal, BusinessWire
When to Use The Article:
- Typically the best (and often only) source for very recent business developments or events
- Useful source of political, social, economic and public commentary
- To determine how an event was reported on at a particular point in time
- Where regional research being conducted local newspapers may be the only, or one of few, sources of information available
Choosing the Right Articles Database
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Click the camera to watch a video about using articles databases for research. This video focuses on two articles databases (ABI Inform Global and Business Source Premier), but the concepts and processes are largely the same across most articles databases. |
Your topic might be interdisciplinary, or quite specific, and as a result may require searching in a variety of different databases. You can access a list of useful indexes and other resources by subject available from the Libraries' home page, as well as a Business Resources A-Z listing available via the Bronfman Business Library's home page. Note that there is also a list of electronic journals pertaining to human resources, which is available via the Bronfman Business Library home page.
The following articles databases are useful when undertaking research in the area of Human Resource Planning.
Sources for Journal and Magazine Articles on HRM themes:
ABI/Inform Global: Is one of the largest business articles databases in York's collection. Contains citations and abstracts for over 3,000 business and management publications. More than 1,000 of these titles are available in full-text or full-image and many of these go back to 1986. This resource incorporates management, industry and company-specific information of both a practical and theoretical nature. Subjects covered include: finance, human resources management, public administration, marketing, management, economics, taxation, telecommunications, corporate strategies, competitive and product information.
ABI/INFORM Trade & Industry: This database is especially useful if you are researching a topic relevant to a particular industry, profession, or product as trade publications are so often targeted at practitioners in a specific industry e.g. HR Professional, or Communications Today.Covers more than 700 trade publications.
CBCA Complete : Provides interdisciplinary coverage of Canadian topics including the areas of business and current affairs. Offers references, and many full text articles, from Canadian journals, magazines, newspapers, and newswires. Dates of coverage vary by title but many full-text titles available from early or mid-1990s, while citations for many publications available from early 1980s onward. Consult CBCA Business, a sub-component of the CBCA Complete database, in order to limit the search specifically to Canadian business journals and magazines, but note that newspaper and newswire coverage are not offered by this product, and coverage of business topics in non-business publications is also not available.
Canadian Newsstand - Major Dailies: This database is helpful for finding Canadian media coverage of your company. A searchable full-text database of major Canadian daily newspapers. Major titles include: Calgary Herald (1988-), Edmonton Journal (1989-), Globe and Mail (1977-), Halifax Daily News (1990-), Montreal Gazette (1985-), National Post (1998-), Ottawa Citizen (1985-), Toronto Star (1985-), Vancouver Sun (1987-). Select the Publications tab for a full listing. There may be a 2 - 7 day delay for the most recent issues.
**** Note that all of the databases above can be searched together. We subscribe to the above databases through Proquest, and by entering one of these databases and clicking on Select Multiple Databases, then selecting databases from the list, you can access them together in a single search.
Factiva: Includes nearly 9,000 sources from 118 countries in 22 languages, including full-text articles from international newspapers including The Globe and Mail, The National Post, and The Toronto Star, and continuously updated newswires and general business news publications like The Economist, Forbes, Fortune, Time, Newsweek, Finanz & Wirtschaft, Satellite News, and BusinessWeek.
Human Resources Abstracts: This database has a narrower focus than ABI Inform or Business Source Premier, but might be helpful for your topic. Includes citations and abstracts for journals, books and papers in the field of human resources studies including human resources management. Topics include but are not limited to: aging and retirement, career preparation, earnings and benefits, health and human resources, hiring and personnel practices, human resources practices and management, labour and industrial relations. Coverage is for 2003 onwards.
LexisNexis Academic: LexisNexis Academic provides searchable access to a comprehensive spectrum of full-text information from over 6,000 news, business, legal, medical, and reference publications. Included are current international newspapers, as well as comprehensive company and industry reports. Information available includes trade and marketing reports, patent details, merger and acquisition analysis, country reports and industry and legal publications.
PsycInfo: Indexes journal articles, dissertations, reports, books, book chapters, and other scholarly documents including literature from over 45 countries in more than 30 languages. Coverage is from 1872 - present. Covering the literature in psychology and related behavioral sciences this database has many applications to work and research in the field of human resources including industrial psychology, organizational behaviour, and others.
Finding an Article When You Have a Citation or Reference
You will find citations in your course reading lists, or from bibliographies/reference lists. When you have a reference or citation to a specific HRM article, you can use the library catalogue's Search Box to determine whether the periodical (i.e. the journal, magazine, or newspaper) in which the article is published is available at York. This can be found on the libraries' home page at www.library.yorku.ca for example:
Maurin, E.and T. Xenogiani. (2007). "Demand for Education and Labor Market Outcomes." Journal of Human Resources, 42(4), p.795-819.
Type the journal's title into the Search Box, and select Periodical Title from the drop down menu:
Effective Search Strategies
Here are some search tips to improve your searching in articles databases:- Avoid natural language i.e. do not type a sentence as you would speak it. Think about the terms as keywords that may be used to describe your topic.
- So that you are not overwhelmed with results, use the advanced search instead of basic search in most databases.
- Keywords should reflect distinctive concepts, i.e. a person or company name, or terms such as personnel planning, or strategic staffing.
- If you get too many results use "and" to narrow your search, e.g. human resources and Canada; compensation and executives
- To expand your search use "or" to combine synonyms or like terms, e.g. employee or personnel or staff; human resources or HR
- When combining terms that are connected via both "and's" and "or's", couch synonyms using brackets ( ) e.g. compensation and (staff or employee)
- Use truncation symbols (most often an asterisk [*]) to find relevant variants of a word, e.g. strateg* will search strategy, strategic, strategies
- In most of the databases the convention is US spelling, therefore use "or" to ensure that both spellings are retrieved e.g. (labor or labour)
- To search for a phrase containing more than two words use quotes, e.g. "chief executive officer"
- Always check either above the results list or on the right or left sides of the results lists to find suggestions for improving your search.
- There are normally ways to limit your search by date , so that you can specify articles that were published in a certain time frame.
For example, if you are looking at the issue of compensation from a human resources perspective, a simple search might look like this:
But this can be improved. An effective search strategy might look like this:
This search ensure that " human resources management" will be searched as a single term through the use of quotation marks. Salar* is given a truncation mark to return hits for both salary and salaries. Without the brackets, the database would return articles for both human resources management and compensation, or just articles with the word salary/salaries. Brackets ensure that either compensation or some variation of salary is returned in the results, along with the phrase human resources management.
Citing Your Sources
It is important that you ensure all your work is properly cited. For guides on how to create bibliographies, consult the York University Libraries' Style guides for footnotes and bibliographies or for information specific to business research, see the Guides to citing print and electronic materials from the Bronfman Business Library.
As students at York, you have access to RefWorks, an online citation management system, which allows you to store marked items in folders, and automatically generates bibliographies in a citation format of your choosing. For information on RefWorks and to create an account, visit the libraries' RefWorks Information page. Scott Library has RefWorks drop-in workshops throughout the year. Scheduled workshops are listed here.Ensure that all your references are included, and are properly cited. Proper citation goes beyond having the right formatting for your references; it is part of ensuring that you have not committed plagiarism in your work. For more information about citations and plagiarism, see the Academic Integrity Tutorial.
HR Planning: Web Resources
Apart from the libraries' collection, there are several key web resources that are of general interest to the study of Human Resources Planning.The following are web links, which are accessible for free online.
Managing for Business Success: Human Resources Industry Canada maintains the "Managing for Business Success" website, which is geared towards small and medium-sized business owners who need source of practical information, tools and advice regarding managing their companies. The section on Human Resources includes links to other valuable resources for HR planning (as well as links for employment relations, hiring, terminations, etc.).
Created by Meghan Ecclestone YUL/BBL/ September 2009
Updated by Meghan Ecclestone, January 2010
Last modified by: Meghan Ecclestone on Wed Jan 27 17:14:10 EST 2010
