This guide introduces students to resources of relevance to Human Resource Planning 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:

1. Key Library Resources
2. Finding Articles on your Topic
   • Different Types of Business Articles
   • Choosing the Right Articles Database
   • Finding an Article When You Have a Citation or Reference
   • Effective Search Strategies
3. Citing Your Sources

Key Library Resources

Library Homepage: Access York’s library system, including the library catalogue and a link to the Bronfman Business Library homepage.

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 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

*** Tip: Use Ulrichs International Periodical Directory to determine if a specific journal is refereed. You can search by journal name, and if it is refereed this symbol will appear beside the journal title:

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

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.

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:

Proquest Business Simultaneously search all business & industry periodicals available through Proquest Central, including the ABI/Inform databases, concentrated publications on the pharmaceutical, banking, computing and telecommunications industries and Canadian, Asian and European business news. Includes wide coverage of corporate governance topics. Specific databases included in the Proquest suite of business databases at York University are: ABI Inform Global, ABI/Inform Trade & Industry, CBCA Business, CBCA Current Events, Proquest Asian Business, and Proquest European.

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.

Business Source Premier: Another large database of business articles. Contains full text for over 7,500 business periodicals and other sources, including scholarly journals, trade and general business magazines, monographs, country economic and industry reports, industry yearbooks, and market research reports.

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.

Sources for Newspaper Articles on HRM Themes:

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.

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.

Canadian Newsstand – Major Dailies : A searchable full-text database of major Canadian daily newspapers. Major titles include: the Calgary Herald (1988-), the Edmonton Journal (1989-), the Globe and Mail (1977-), the Halifax Daily News (1990-), the Montreal Gazette (1985-), the National Post (1998-), the Ottawa Citizen (1985-)the Toronto Star (1985-), and the Vancouver Sun (1987-). Select the Publications tab for a full listing. There may be a 2 – 7 day delay for the most recent issues.

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:

Campion, M.A., Fink, A.A., Ruggeber, B.J., Carr, L., Phillips, G.M. & Odman, R.B. (2011). “Doing Competency Well: Best Practices in Competency Modeling.” Personnel Psychology, 64(1), p.225-262.

Type the journal’s title into the Search Box, and select Periodical Title from the drop down menu:

Make sure to enter the title of the journal or magazine in which the article appears in the Search Box, and not the title of the article. Then check to see if the libraries have the volume and issue you need:

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 what methods companies use to screen job applicants when recruiting for jobs your search may look something like this:

screen* and recruit* is given a truncation mark to return hits for screen, screening etc. and recruit, recruits, recruitment, recruiting etc. The above search also introduces synonyms or like terms, e.g. recruit or hire or hiring.

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.

Created by Sophie Bury, September 2011