Depending on your area of study, you may need to look for some practitioner content to include in your work. Practitioner sources are important if you are trying to illustrate what is happening or how things are done in practice.
You will find practitioner content in a number of places. Some books will be written as a ‘how to’ guide or provide ideas from a practitioner perspective. There are also many practitioner websites – most businesses have a web presence serving their own community of practitioners or their clients. As a student, this can be useful for gaining an insight into the business but the information is not always suitable to include in your assignment.
Practitioner journals (sometimes referred to as trade or professional journals) are good sources of information for your assignments. These may be produced in-house within organisations and reflects the businesses own interests e.g. The Chartered Managers Institute is responsible for the Professional Manager magazine. There are lots of practitioner journals to choose from and they are great if you want to keep up-to-date with the latest trends, developments and news from within an industry or profession.
Only a couple of the main journal databases for business contain practitioner journals. These are ABI Global and Business Source Premier. On ABI Global, enter your keywords and search as usual before selecting the option to narrow your search down by the ‘Trade Journals’ Source type. Similarly, within the Advanced Search page on Business Source Premier, you can select ‘Trade Publication’ under the Publication Type field.