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Business Studies Research Skills Guide: Evaluate your resources

This Bachelor of Business Studies guide is designed to help you to understand the skills and tools you'll need to complete the research for your assessments.

Evaluate

Using credible information will improve the quality of your assessment and may result in better marks, but how can you tell whether the resources you've found are credible and suitable for your assessment? Have you been asked to use peer reviewed, academic or refereed articles? Are you using authoritative websites?

The information below will help you evaluate the information you find, in books, journal articles, or online to make sure it’s reliable.

Peer review and scholarly resources

For your assessments you need to find scholarly resources which are academic or authoritative sources.

What is an academic or scholarly source?

  • It is authoritative: it identifies the qualifications and expertise of the writer.
  • It is well-cited: academic writing always credits the origins of information and ideas with a reference list.
  • It is usually peer-reviewed or refereed: other academics have read and reviewed the work before publication.
  • It is objective: an academic source should aim to examine a topic fairly, not ignoring opposing opinions.
  • It is written for academics: university lecturers, students, and professionals in the field.

To find peer reviewed articles:

  • select to show only peer reviewed journals in Primo Search.
  • limit to peer reviewed or scholarly journals in journal databases using the filters.

However, as these options are just an indication of peer review status the definitive way to find out if your article has been peer reviewed is to use Ulrichsweb Global Periodicals Directory.

Analysis methods

Five Forces Analysis

This method focuses on the five forces: Buyers, Suppliers, Competitive rivalry, Potential new entrants, and Firms with substitute products. 
For more information on how to locate this information within our library databases, see the Research strategy for Five forces analysis table. 

PESTLE Analysis

A PESTLE analysis is a tool used to gain a macro picture of an industry environment. A SWOT analysis concentrates on a company's internal processes and PESTLE provides information on external factors. 

PESTLE stands for Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal and Environmental factors. It allows you to gain information on the factors that might impact a new business or industry. Some factors will be more important to different types of businesses, and a PESTLE analysis will help identity risk factors for the SWOT analysis.

There are a range of places you can search to find this information:

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