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ACC 498: Senior Seminar In Accounting: Find Articles

Updated by Terrence Bennett, Business / Economics Librarian, Spring 2024

Article search: getting started | Interlibrary loan for articles not available at TCNJ

For a refresher on how to search for articles, review the relevant content (find articles) from IDS102 (Library research skills and information literacy).

If you identify an article that is not available to you from TCNJ, then you can request a copy of the article via interlibrary loan (ILL).

Finding Journals at TCNJ

Does TCNJ Library hold a journal (either online or in print) that you're looking for? Find out here.

Tip

You can remove a lot of the guesswork from the process of locating good articles by following one simple strategy: When you find just one relevant article, use the citations at the end of the article as a starting point to find more articles. In other words, see whose work the author has referenced, and see if it may be useful for your work.

Finding Articles

Find articles / scholarly research about your topic.

ABI/Inform Global (ProQuest).  Articles on business, management and industry; includes peer-reviewed scholarly research.  Full-text coverage for more than half of included sources.

  • Change search interface from Basic to Advanced
  • Search for keywords and phrases, then use suggested search terms (or subject terms from relevant results) to refine search
  • Includes full-text coverage of The Wall Street Journal from 1984-present (see direct link to WSJ below).

Wall Street Journal (1984-current via ABI/Inform).  Direct link to the WSJ works from TCNJ campus only; when logging in from off-campus, start with ABI/Inform (see link above) and select Wall Street Journal as the publication title.

Business Source Premier (EBSCO)

  • Change search interface from Basic Search to Advanced Search
  • Search for keywords and phrases, then use Subject terms from relevant results to refine search
  • Includes the full text of articles from the Journal of Accounting Research (1963-present)

Business Abstracts with full text (Wilson Web)

  • Change search interface from Basic to Advanced
  • Search for keywords and phrases, then use suggested search terms (or subject terms from relevant results) to refine search

Science Direct (Elsevier)

  • Don't be fooled by the database name: "Science" includes social sciences, which encompasses journals in Business, Management, Accounting, Economics and Econometrics, and Finance.
  • Select "Advanced Search" from the menu at the top of the home page, then scroll down to populate the advanced search box with keywords and subject areas.

Social Science Research Network (SSRN)

  • Drill through to a topic of interest (for example: Research disciplines / Social sciences / Accounting), then select "Research Paper Series," and you can browse research by institution.  Or, simply try a search in the search box on the upper right of the homepage.
  • This is not peer-reviewed material, but it may very helpful for generating ideas and finding relevant (and recent) work in progress.

Google Scholar

  • Find citations to scholarly articles (including accounting research articles), then retrieve the full text from TCNJ's journal collection (if available).  Note: if you connect to Google Scholar from off campus, be sure to connect via the Library's website in order to receive information about TCNJ's holdings for items found in Google Scholar.

Using the thesaurus to find search terms

Look for the thesaurus function to enhance your search. Like the thesaurus you may have used while writing a paper, the thesaurus function in an article database (sometimes called a controlled vocabulary or subject terms listing) shows related and synonymous words for your search terms. In a database, the thesaurus is also an alphabetical listing of all of the subject terms used to categorize the information in the database.

The thesaurus can help you find other ways to talk about your subject and to learn what category labels the database uses for your topic. For example, you might search the thesaurus for "executive salaries" and find out that the database uses the phrase "executive compensation" instead. You can use the thesaurus to add "executive compensation" to your search and get all the relevant items in the database.

The thesaurus is often found in the menu bar or in the advanced search of a database.