Answered Questions

You may ask librarians how to find articles on the topic of minimum wage, but doing research for your paper is part of the assignment your professor has given to the class. 

For best results on this topic, the place to start is the Business Administration LibGuide. http://libguides.brenau.edu/business

Click on the yellow Articles tab at the top.

In the middle of the page, you'll see a list of the best databases for finding articles about business topics. Click on one to start finding items - for an example, click on Business Source Complete.

Log in with your Brenau username and password.

Doing a search for minimum wage by itself will provide a lot of results, so it may be helpful to narrow your search a little.  In the search box at the top, type your search terms: minimum wage AND business. The AND is a Boolean search term, which tells the database that you want to find only articles that include BOTH of these words in it. Also, if you want to search for minimum wage as a phrase, you could type "minimum wage" in the search box. The quotation marks tell the database that you want to find only articles that include that whole specific phrase, with the words in that particular order. When you have entered your search terms, click the Search button.

You may see an overwhelming number of results when you start, but you can narrow them down using the options on the side of the results page. Here's some of the best options you might choose to refine your search results:

• Full Text - This gives you only articles that you may read immediately, usually a PDF or webpage.
• Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals - This gives you only articles from academic journals that have undergone rigorous scholarly review before publication. No newspapers or People Magazine here!
• Publication Date - This is how you can choose the date range for articles in the results.
• Subject: Thesaurus Term - This option gives you a list of the most-used terms in the wide range of results you've found. You can check the terms that most closely apply to what you are looking for to narrow down your subtopics.

Depending on your topic, you may find other limiters like Geography or Industry to be helpful. Try different ones to see what kinds of articles you get!

After you have finished searching in one database, try to run the same search in different databases (perhaps ABI/INFORM Complete or ScienceDirect). Each database is a different collection, and the same search can find you different results in each collection.

Please let us know if we can be of any further help!