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Searching ABS Journals in Business Source Premier


In Business and Management Studies, researchers undertaking a literature review sometimes search across a defined group of journals. This is a way of focusing the literature search to make the results more relevant to the questions in hand. Groups are often chosen from the Association of Business Schools (ABS)'s Academic Journal Guide. Read more how about how they put together the guide here.

There are several ways to search across ABS journals. Here is how to do it in Business Source Premier, a leading literature database for this subject area. 

1.    Login into the ABS journal guide. If you have never used it before you will need to create an account.


2.    You can use the guide to draw up a group of journals either by using the Rankings information or the Fields. Fields divides up the journals into categories of research focus e.g. Accounting, Finance etc. In this example we will use the Fields. The field we are interested is ‘Operations Research and Marketing’. 

3.    Choose ‘Operations Research and Marketing’ from the list of fields. The list of journals below will update. There are 66 journals in this field.


In a new window or tab, login to Business Source Premier via the Library website. Choose Publication on the top menu.



5.    In the search box underneath Browsing:  Business Source Premier -- Publications enter the first journal title in your list (which in this example is Management Science) and choose Browse.



6.    Examine the search results. If the right journal is there, tick the box next to it and click Add. The name of the journal will appear in the large search box at the top of the screen.* 


7.    Repeat this process until you have added the journals you need. Be patient: it may take you a while! Then choose the green Search button.


8. Now add the search terms you want to use. Here our keywords are incentives AND return on investment OR ROI.  

Refine your keywords as necessary to get relevant results. It is a good idea to use the search history to record and edit searches.





You could write a search string for the journals instead. However, browsing the publication list allows you to check whether Business Source Premier has the journal you want, and that you are searching the right title (some journals have similar names). You could search using the ISSNs of the journals instead. If you can't find a journal in Business Source Premier make a note - you may want to try the same search in another database (like Scopus or Web of Science) afterwards. 

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