New edition of key business textbook: Management Research by Easterby-Smith - hot off the press

The latest (4th) edition of Management Research by Easterby-Smith, M, Thorpe, R, & Jackson, P; London : SAGE, 2012 has just hit the shelves at St. Peter’s Library and you can find more details on the library catalogue here.

This is a hugely popular book for academics and students alike and is recommended reading on several business module guides - which is why we’ve purchased plenty of copies!

Unfortunately this book has not been published in ebook format, but a preview is available on Google Books here

Find out how to use Google Scholar to find academic information on the web

A good blog post from the law blog - but also useful for business and tourism students…

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Scholar.google.co.uk is a Google search product which allows you to search for scholarly content on the web.  Google Scholar indexes content across a wide range of subject disciplines (e.g. articles, theses, and books) and sources (e.g. academic publishers, universities, and other web sites).  Use Google Scholar alongside search tools such as the Library Catalogue and Discover to help you find information for your studies.

Top tip: use Settings to tell Google Scholar that you are from the University of Sunderland, and you will then see links to articles for which we have subscriptions to the full-text.  Here’s how to do this:

1. From the Scholar homepage, go to Settings

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2. Click on Library Links and search for ‘Sunderland’

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3. Select ‘University of Sunderland’ and ‘Save’

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Note that cookies will be used to ‘remember’ these settings in your browser, so you will need to repeat these steps if using a different browser or computer

4. Next to items for which the library has a subscription, you will see links to the full-text article, such as ‘[PDF from jstor.org]’ in the example below

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Open Access Week 2011 - The Business Case for Open Access

Today, I’m not recommending an Open Access(OA) resource as such, rather let’s consider the business case for OA…

Open Access rewards not only researchers and universities but also the UK economy as a whole. As a knowledge economy, the effectiveness of the UK’s research community – and the dissemination of that research – is essential to its success.

According to the Houghton report (January 2009), the financial return to UK plc from greater accessibility to research could result in an additional £172 million per year of benefits from government and higher education sector research alone. This is on top of the £80 million saving UK higher education could make by shifting from toll access to open Open Access publishing.

Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) are vital to a vibrant economy and these businesses, in particular, find it difficult to access the research papers they consider to be crucial sources of information for their work. Recent research shows that cost is the biggest single barrier when SMEs attempt to access research papers. Open Access will directly address this and so help to stimulate the innovation the UK needs.

Neil Jacobs1 (JISC programme manager, Innovation Group) has said:

“Open Access is absolutely crucial right now. Getting out of recession is going to be based on innovation, it’s going to be based on the private sector having access to the outputs from the public research base and being able to use that to innovate and to compete much more effectively in the global economy. To do that it will need to have access to research outputs.”

For more information, videos and podcasts on the business case for OA, check out the JISC website: http://bit.ly/5bwl5J .

Open Access Week 2011 - it’s nearly here!

24th-30th October is Open Access Week.

This is an international event promoting open access in scholarship and research. Look out for features on the University Library and SURE web pages, our Twitter feed and Facebook pages. We’ll be focussing on what open access resources are available, and how you can find them.

For more information about what open access is and what’s going on around the world for OAW11, have a look at this web site.

Throughout OAW11, I’ll be recommending some of my favourite Open Access sources for business and tourism subjects - so keep checking this blog next week!  In the mean time, have a look at the SURE web site where you can see how open accesss can help you.