Skip to Main Content

Project Management: Search for Information

How to search for and find information on project management

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. 

To learn how to use the Library Catalogue, watch this video:

Example:

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

'Mastering project management' - book from Library catalogue

'Monitoring project duration and cost..' - article from the Library catalogue

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. 

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:

Advanced 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

 

'Sustainable project management through project control' - article from ScienceDirect database

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