Hospitality Research:
Finding Articles

Searching for employee* AND (retention OR turnover) AND “hospitality industry”

Keyword Searching Tips:

• Truncation: Using a truncation symbol – in most databases it’s an asterisk (*) – will allow you to search for variations of a word. Place an asterisk where you want the variation to begin. For example, employee* will search for employee or employees.
  
• Boolean operators (and, or, not): Use these operators to link your keywords
  • AND requires all terms connected with an AND to be in the article (narrows search)
  • OR either term or both terms is present in the article (broadens search)
  • NOT specifies that a term not be present (narrows search)
• Grouping similar concepts: Connect synonyms on the same line with the word ‘OR’
• Phrases: To find an exact phrase, use "quotation marks." For example, you may want to look for articles about the hospitality industry, not articles about hospitality AND industry.

Selecting a Field

For more specific searching, you can look for terms in a particular field (author, article title, journal name, etc.) If you are searching for a term that may be so rare or obscure that it may not be the focus of an entire article, try searching for the term in ‘All Text’.

Limiting Your Results

Many databases provide options to limit your search to full text articles. However, limiting your search to full text is never recommended. Limiting your search to “full-text only” will eliminate many useful articles that may be available in other databases or in our print collection.

Most databases also allow you to limit your search results to “peer-reviewed,” “scholarly” or “academic” journal articles. Unless it is a requirement of your assignment, it is usually better not to limit yourself to “academic” journals, since a lot of useful hospitality-related information is contained in “trade publications” (publications devoted to covering the industry in a specialized and educated, but not necessarily “scholarly,” manner). See the Scholarly, Trade, or Popular? guide for more information.

You may limit your results further after you run your initial search. For more assistance with advanced search options, ask a librarian for help.

The results of a search will provide you with vital information for each item:

• Citation (title, author, journal, date, etc.)
• Full text link, if available
• Links to other options for locating the full text

Partial results of a keyword search

Click on the blue title of any article to view its abstract and subject terms, as well as email, printing, citing, and saving options. Be aware that to save or print full text articles in PDF format, you must use the options within Adobe Acrobat Reader.

There are many other ways to search for articles effectively, so ask for help if you do not get good results. We can also retrieve materials for you from other libraries, if necessary—see the Interlibrary Loan Rosen Research Guide for more information.