Research Process - MGMT/COMM 22200 Organizational Communication - Clevenger

Process

Determine your topic, then follow a process which makes sense to you for gathering relevant information.
Gather current events information about your company / example.
Explore academic journals and trade publications for information about your organizational behavior(s).
Search for related current events and news-based items related to your topic. Synthesize.

Explore Specific Problems

These resources provide information on countries, markets, companies, and consumers. The database contents may help with marketing planning, lifestyle profiling, market performance analysis and strategic forecasting.

Find current events, problems, opportunities, and competitive forces as well as economic, political, and social environment. Also find specific problems in periodical or newspaper indexes.

U. S. Census
Every 10 years, the U.S. government tries to gather demographic data from everyone in the U.S. It's in your best interest to respond when you receive your questionnaire.
Census Data Guide (from CUNY)
Economic Census
Every five years, the U.S. Census Bureau collects extensive statistics about businesses that are essential to understanding the American economy. This official count, better known as the Economic Census, serves as the foundation for the measurement of U.S. businesses and their economic impact.

Sage Data Foundations This link opens in a new window
Explore a curated collection of United States statistics in Data Planet Foundations. With this dynamic tool, you can scan and search the contents of billions of datasets, compare and contrast variables of interest, and create customized views in tables, maps, rankings, and charts. Views also include descriptive summaries of the datasets and data sources. Datasets cover a wide range of subjects – including business, finance, banking, economics, sociology, political science, demography, agriculture, education, international studies, criminal justice, housing and construction, labor and employment, energy resources and industries, and more. Sources include public, private/commercial, and nongovernmental organizations. Note: Data Planet Data will not be updated after 2021.

Journal Titles List
Find out if you can access a particular Journal. Search for a Journal Title or browse by title of subject area.

Precision in Searching & Search Terms

Boolean Searching (or how to get the most from your search terms):

The words "AND," "OR," and "NOT" can help you make a search more precise. This is called Boolean searching, and it can seem really intimidating, but once you get the hang of them, Boolean searches can really help you!

For example, the search 'films AND psychology NOT children', will return a search with results that contain the keywords 'films' and 'pyschology' but not 'children' - important if you are only looking at adolescent psychology in films.

Learn more with this guide from the MIT libraries. It really helps explain Boolean searching, and you don’t have to be a computer scientist to understand!

Suggested Search Terms (for communication issues):

public relations
strategic communication
corporate image
communication in personnel management
communication in organizations
communication in management
business communication

Explore Scholarly Sources

Explore the scholarly literature about Organizational Communication.

Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Multidisciplinary database that indexes and abstracts some 9,300 periodicals, both popular and scholarly. Provides full-text to more than 5,300 journals.
Business Source Complete This link opens in a new window
Indexes and abstracts some 5,000 business-related publications. Provides full-text to more than 4,000 periodicals. Coverage of important scholarly journals goes back to the first issue (or back to 1886 in the most extreme case). Also includes financial data, industry reports, company profiles, SWOT analyses, market research reports, and more.
Communication and Mass Media Complete This link opens in a new window
Indexes some 400 titles related to the media and communication studies. Nearly 200 of the titles are also available in full-text. Some coverage back as far as 1915.
PsycINFO This link opens in a new window
The online version of Psychological Abstracts provides indexing to articles and books chapters published worldwide from 1887 to the present.

Popular Press

Search Popular Press / News / Media sources for topics.

Google News
Freely available aggregation of news sources.
Yahoo! News
Freely available aggregation of popular news sources.
Hiram College Library's Newspaper Subscriptions
The Hiram College Library subscribes to a number of print and online newspapers. This page highlights what we have and how to find them.

Access World News Research Collection This link opens in a new window
Research diverse perspectives, topics and trends that align with curricular areas such as Political Science, English, Sociology, Humanities, Business, International Studies and more. Features reliable, credible information from a wide variety of international, national, and local news sources including the Akron Beacon Journal, Plain Dealer, Record-Courier, and USA Today. Available remotely 24/7 on any device.
New York Times This link opens in a new window
The New York Times contains every article, fully searchable, published in the New York Times since 1851. First, set up an account (instructions here). Then just connect to nytimes.com and login. Or, once you have your account set up, download the NYTimes app from the app store. For more information on setting up an account and using the iPad app, see the New York Times Subject Guide.
http://www.nytimes.com/
Times Digital Archive 1785-2019 This link opens in a new window
As close to a world newspaper of record, the Times (London) is the oldest continuously published newspaper in the world. The digital archives includes every page since the beginning in 1785 through 2019.

Research Note

Note that Google News will have up-to-the-minute news and events information, but you should carefully evaluate the sources you find and check some of the resources discussed above for confirmation and additional background. Google Scholar is another source you might use to narrow your topic; if you use Google Scholar from on-campus you will automatically have access to library resources when they are available in your results set. If you use Google Scholar from off-campus, use this link that will ask you to login with your Hiram credentials.