Page 82 - [Uma_Sekaran]_Research_methods_for_business__a_sk(BookZZ.org)

66 THE RESEARCH PROCESS

Databases are also available for obtaining statistics—marketing, financial, and
so on—and directories are organized by subject, title, geographic location, trade
opportunities, foreign traders, industrial plants, and so on. Some of these online
databases are listed in Section I of the Appendix at the end of this chapter.
Online searches provide a number of advantages. Besides saving enormous
amounts of time, they are comprehensive in their listing and review of refer-
ences, and the researcher can focus on materials most central to the research
effort. In addition, finding access to them is relatively inexpensive.
Some of the important research databases available online and on the World
Wide Web are provided in the Appendix to this chapter. Access to these can be
had online or through the Internet. If a source of information is not known, the
search strategies on the Internet help to find it. Databases include, among others,
listings of journal articles, books in print, census data, dissertation abstracts, con-
ference papers, and newspaper abstracts that are useful for business research.
Details of some of these databases can be found in the Appendix to this chapter.

Extracting the Relevant Information
Accessing the online system and getting a printout of all the published works in
the area of interest from a bibliographical index (some useful indexes are provided
in Section 2 of the Appendix to this chapter) will provide a comprehensive bibli-
ography on the subject, which will form the basis for the next step. Whereas the
printout could sometimes include as many as a hundred or more listings, a glance
at the titles of the articles or books will indicate which of these may be pertinent
and which others are likely to be peripheral to the contemplated study. The
abstract of such articles that seem to be relevant can then be obtained through the
online system. This will give an idea of the articles that need to be looked into in
depth, the full text of which can then be printed out. While reading these articles,
detailed information on the problem that was researched, the design details of the
study (such as the sample size and data collection methods), and the ultimate find-
ings could be systematically noted in some convenient format. This facilitates the
writing up of the literature review with minimum disruption and maximum effi-
ciency. While reading the articles, it is possible that certain other factors are also
found to be closely related to the problem at hand. For instance, while reading the
articles on the effectiveness of Information Systems, the researcher might find that
the size of the company has also been found to be an important factor. The
researcher might then want to know more about how the size of organizations is
categorized and measured by others and, hence, might want to read materials on
organization size. All the articles considered relevant to the current study can be
then listed as references, using the appropriate referencing format, which is dis-
cussed in Section 3 of the Appendix to this chapter.

Writing Up the Literature Review
The documentation of the relevant studies citing the author and the year of the
study is called literature review or literature survey. The literature survey is a