INB 334 International Communication: Organizational Perspectives: Home

Schedule an individual consultation with a research librarian through this link.  A librarian is happy to help you at any point in the research process, from helping you develop a topic for your project, to finding information, to helping with citations. Zoom or in-person available.

Need a quick refresher on how to use a database or request an interlibrary loan item?  Visit the d'Alzon library's YouTube for a number of short How-To videos including the one below about locating business case studies. 

Welcome to the research guide for INB 334! This guide includes library resources and services for each task within your semester long project. Use the tabs at the top to navigate to journals, databases, books, and web resources arranged by topic. Below are a set of other research guides that shed more light on related subjects. If you have any questions, please contact the library through the "Contact Us" tab on the left! 

Source evaluation is a critical step in the research process because this process ensures that the sources are credible whether it is a website, a scholarly article, or a newspaper. Though evaluation is a very nuanced and layered concept, you can start by exploring these four areas: 

• Author: The goal here is to establish the author's experience and credentials to write about a given topic. To gather this information, look at other pieces the author has written and what organization he/she works for. 
• Publication: Determine the legitimacy of the source.
  • If the source is a scholarly journal, is the journal peer-reviewed? Do the references cited in the article make sense? 
  • If the source is popular, what is the public perception of the source? Is it well-regarded? 
• Funding: Money can influence what is written about topics, so it is important to investigate for traces of financial influence.  
  • Studies and surveys might have information in sections titled acknowledgements, conflict of interest, and funding.
• Claims: The easiest place is to start with what can be verified (numbers, quotes, facts, statistics, etc.) by either a reference or using external tools like Google and Wikipedia to verify (a process called lateral reading).

The tools below provide more concrete ways to investigate your sources with charts and a video on lateral reading.