Study Guides: Project Management: Search for Information

Finding books & articles

A great place to start searching for information is the Library catalogue. Use the Library catalogue to find books and journal articles on your topic.

Example:

Below are a book & article found in the Library Catalogue searching with the keywords: Project control quality

Tip:

When searching for journal articles, try restricting your search to peer reviewed articles. Because peer reviewed articles have been double-checked by academic experts, it's easier to be sure that the words and ideas you're using are of sufficient quality for a university assignment.

Library Catalogue

Evaluating your results

Not all the information you get from a search will be useful. A successful search will show results relevant to your topic. If your results are not relevant go back and try different keywords in your search.

To evaluate whether your source is of sufficient quality use the S.I.F.T Test. Click on the letters of the acronym to learn more:

Boolean Searching

In this search we're looking for all the combinations of our projects with all of the possible concepts in the assignment question. The full search syntax is:

("Project scope" OR "project execution" OR "project monitoring" OR "project control" OR "project management") AND (Procurement OR risk OR quality)

Remember:

Add a keyword if you have too many hits and they aren't focused enough on the topic.
Remove a keyword or add more related terms if you don't get enough good hits.

Notice that when you add the extra search terms it changes the top hits in the search?

'Project execution' book found with Boolean search in the catalogue

Other places to search

Finally, try running your search in more than one database. The databases linked below all contain useful literature. The above image is from an item found in the ScienceDirect database.

ScienceDirect ScienceDirect is great for journal article content in the field of project management, as well as covering management topics more generally.
Proquest ProQuest is a multidisciplinary database that contains books, journal articles, news and more. It's good for management topics, but the collection is slightly less focused on project management than ScienceDirect
Taylor and Francis Online Journals Taylor and Francis contains a rich collection of high quality academic writing on management topics, including aspects of Project Management. It's also good for Australian content
Google Scholar via UTS Library link use this link to find UTS Library subscription articles via Google Scholar

Project Management: Search for Information