Business, Accounting, Management and Marketing

You will be accessing a wide variety of items throughout your programme, to learn more about the subject.  Commonly used types of item are summarised below.  Some are more suitable for inclusion in your assignments than others.

Check the Evaluating Sources guide for tools to help with this decision.

Academic textbooks are usually written by subject experts. They are longer than journal articles and also take longer to be written and published.

• Great for overviews, theories, exam revision
• Can be short and very specific, or cover a much broader topic
• Updated regularly to reflect new developments in the subject - these are called new editions
• Available in print and online - the content is the same

Having the newest edition is vital in some subject areas, but less significant in others. Your tutor may recommend that you can use any edition of some texts. Older editions are usually cheaper when buying your own copy.

Journals are published on a regular basis - weekly, monthly, quarterly - and are comprised of a selection of articles relevant to the journal's specialty.  Journals can be:

• Trade publications. 
• Aimed at employees and other practitioners.
• For those in management roles. 
• Designed to facilitate scholarly discussion and research.

Like journals, the articles appearing in them vary in purpose, style and length.  They usually provide details on:

• Current talking points/ other news updates.
• Practical applications of specific interventions.
• Best practice in specific areas, e.g. discussion or recommendations from practitioners/ experts..
• Recent research studies.
• Literature which has been published in specific fields - often reviews highlighting where further research would be beneficial.

Some articles, especially those in scholarly journals, are scrutinised by subject experts  - peer reviewed - before they are accepted for publication.  This ensures a broader, more rigourous presentation.

Statistical information is useful to illustrate certain situations such as the impact of social and economic circumstances. For business, it will be essential when discussing a market or company.

Statistical information for business can be difficult to find - the Statistics tab in this guide has some ideas to help you get started.

In the UK, dissertations are research projects prepared by Honours or Masters level students, usually as the final assignment of their degree programme. 

Selected dissertations in some subject areas are passed to the Library for other students to use as exemplars for layout and formatting.

Theses are longer, more in-depth projects prepared by PhD students.

These are often examples of first-hand - or primary - research and can be held in a university's archive.

Note, some countries use a different match of level and description for such works.

Like journal articles, newspaper articles and other news sources vary in length and purpose.  Short updates or sensationalist stories are often not detailed enough to be considered appropriate for inclusion in academic assignments. 

Longer essay-style articles can be good introductory sources for exploring potential discussion points. 

News sources are particularly useful for illustrating economic circumstances and social attitudes.  This confirmation of circumstances at particular points in time enables analysis of social trends.