Business Systems and Operations Subject Guide

Knowing the difference between academic (or scholarly) and practitioner sources is important because it helps you to make good choices when it comes to finding literature to support your assignments.

We have made a video to find out the differences between academic and practitioner journals.

You will often be expected to use academic material because this is widely preferred in higher education – such material is aimed at academics and covers the theories and research, which have usually gone through a rigorous peer-review process to ensure their quality.  If you are undertaking postgraduate or higher level research, it is particularly important that you are able to identify academic sources so we have provided a short video.

• ABI Global Contains journal articles from a range of subject areas including business, economics, finance and information sciences. Many articles are in full, with some abstract only. A list of included publications is available.
• Business Source Premier is a business research database providing over 2,200 full text journals (including the Harvard Business Review), many with long backfiles. This database covers many subjects, including marketing, management, accounting, finance and economics. Additional full text, non-journal content includes market research reports, industry reports, country reports, company profiles and SWOT analyses.
• Emerald Full articles from 120 business, accounting, marketing, health management, HRM and IS journals and abstracts of articles from many more.
• Sage Journals Online Full text access to electronic journals published by Sage Publications.
• ScienceDirect is a full text database of over 1000 journal titles and is produced by Elsevier. It covers 1995 to the present and is a higher level database covering most subject areas. In order to view search results you will need to click on activate personalisation and complete the form the first time you log into Science Direct.
• Taylor & Francis Online is the journal content platform for the Taylor & Francis Group. The platform gives online access to all journals from Taylor & Francis and Routledge. A program of retrodigitization means they have articles going back just over 200 years. The collection includes over 1600 full text titles in science and social science subject areas.
• Wiley Online Access to full-text journals published by Wiley Interscience. Some titles go back to the 1980s. Useful for most subject areas.