Skip to Main Content
Guides

Business Source Complete (BSC) (Database Instruction)

Business Source Complete is a comprehensive database containing thousands of full-text journals and magazines, e-books, case studies, industry reports, market research reports, company profiles, SWOT analyses, and more.

Advanced Search

The default search for Business Source Complete (BSC) is the Advanced Search.  This gives you a lot of flexibility when creating searches. Boxes and dropdowns are provided to help you structure your search. 

When you start entering your search word(s), you are offered some preset search phrases; if one of these is what you are looking for simply click on it, otherwise you can ignore the suggestions. Farther down the page there are many options to limit your search, such as full-text, publication type, document type, NAICS number, peer-review and more.  If you don't select limiters you will see all available results after clicking on search, even those that do not have the full text available.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Search Results View

Results for this first search show under the Search Box.  You see the total number of results, in this case over 33,000.  They are a mixture of all source types: articles, peer-reviewed articles, newspaper items, video results, company reports and more.  Importantly, they are a mixture of full-text articles which you can read immediately, and citations only which do not have the full text attached. 

 

The Result List Screen has two columns:

Refine Results - The left column below the search boxes shows your current search at the top. Below this are Limiters which allow you to make your search narrower and more specific.

Search Results - The total number of results along with the list of articles, reports, videos, etc. retrieved by your search words are displayed in the middle column. These appear 30 at a time.