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LER 464 : Communication Skills for Leaders in Groups and Organizations

a guide to resources for LER 464.

Search Terms and Techniques

When conducting research, combine the terms that you have come across in your syllabus or in your readings.

  • Leadership AND Ethics include articles where both terms appear
  • "Leadership style" AND "organizational culture" will have articles that include BOTH phrases
  • Think about synonyms: "organizatonal culture" OR "corporate culture" will include articles that have EITHER term

Once you have an article or two that seems to fit your research need, see what subject terms have been applied to the article.

Articles where the subject term “Leadership style” exists will give you fewer and better results that where “leadership style” is simply mentioned in the text of an article.

In the EBSCO databases (Academic Search Complete, Business Source Premier and Communication and Mass Media Complete) you can use the following search tips to help you search more effectively:

Phrase searching

Enclose a phrase in double quotation marks " " as we did with "leadership style"

Wildcards

The wildcard is represented by a question mark. (?)  To use the ? wildcard, enter your search terms and replace each unknown character with a ?. The database will find all citations of that word with the ? replaced by a letter. An example would be wom?n. This search will locate women and woman. 

Truncation

Truncation is represented by an asterisk (*). To use truncation, enter the root of a search term and replace the ending with an *. The database will find all forms of that word.

For example, type member* to find the words members or membership.

An example putting these tips together would be:

“Case stud*” and “leadership skill*”

The above search will look for articles where “Case Study” OR “Case studies” is included. The articles will also include the terms “leadership skill” or “leadership skills”.

For additional help with search, use the HELP section in the database….or contact a librarian for assistance.

All databases have similar ways to make your search more effective. However, another database may use different symbols, or use quotation marks and parentheses differently.

References in your textbook may be owned by the library. Use LionSearch to find if the material is available full text online. If it is available only in print, you can request that the materials be sent to you through the Interlibrary Loan process