Discovery Service, Business Source Complete, Ebsco e-journals, – what’s the difference for Business Students?

I have been asked by several Business School students about the various e-services provided by a company called Ebsco.  Here are a few guidelines I use:

The Discovery Service is a quick one stop shop offering our catalogue and the contents of over 100 different databases. It is the default search on our home page. It will provide thousands of hits for most queries pointing you to our print books, e-books and journal articles.

I use this for quickness -to pick out some books and articles together. Perhaps when the quality of the item is not quite so important. It is also good to use when covering two aspects of a subject such as education and business.

Use the left hand links to reduce results by date, format or availability.  A cut down “Business” version is available that omits most of the highly scientific databases.

Business Source Complete is a subject database. Articles from business and management  academic and professional journals plus many trade magazines are indexed according to a common language so that users can find articles by topic. You will find many full-text links but do follow the “Locate full text” links as well – you will often find yourself directed to pdf articles from Emerald, ScienceDirect and other mainstream publishers. I start here with most queries that are focussed on mainstream business and management subjects including economics, accounting, operations research etc – often there is enough information to begin to really explore a topic.

Economists will find Econlit (compiled by the American Economic Assoication) a major resource – again another Ebsco specialist database.

Ebsco on the database page is a link to a database of e-journals that Ebsco supply to libraries across the world. It is a general database covering many subject areas. The business, management and economic content of this service is far less than Business Source Complete.