Answered Questions

A good place to begin your research is the Business Libguide.  Click the orange tab, "Business Administration -- Articles."  There you will find a number of databases that contain the type of scholarly, peer-reviewed and trade articles you need.

For research as specific as your topic, you will want to search more than one database.  Although it is more time consuming, I recommend searching one database at a time.  I don't recommend using a federated subject search (a search that incorporates many databases at one time) because they are notorious for not retrieving all of the results from every database.  There are technical and proprietary reasons between the databases themselves for this problem. In any case, federated search engines will often say that we do not own an article we know we do own, or will simply not display a number of results we know should display.  That's not as much of a problem when you are doing a search on a broad or simple topic, but this query does not produce enough results for that to be an effective strategy.

The databases you will likely fine most helpful are ABI/Inform Complete, Business Source Complete, and Research Library, but others like Academic Search Complete may also be helpful.

Unless you are familiar with Boolean Searching you may want to use the Advanced Search function to help the search engines understand how to break up your search terms.  For example, in an Advanced Search display you will have at least three search boxes.  In the first box, type "capital budget*" (the * tells the engine you want budgets, budgeting, etc.), in the second box type "cash flow," and in the third box you may write "overestimate" or you may write "project analysis."  I would suggest picking between one or the other third term because the more you limit your results, the fewer results you will retrieve. 

If you don't receive a sufficient amount of relevant results, try removing words or terms to open up your list of results.  If that doesn't help, try brainstorming a number of additional terms that would be relevant to your topic.  Use the dictionaries and encyclopedias you can find in the Background Research section of the Business LibGuide, or contact a librarian for an appointment for further assistance.