Hospitality Research:
Searching in Databases

This guide will help you use databases to find articles from journals, magazines, and newspapers about your topic. For more assistance, please Ask a Rosen Librarian.

A printable version of this guide is also available: Databases PDF (215 KB)

• UCF subscribes to hundreds of databases, and each one has unique features. Therefore, do not hesitate to ask for help if you are unsure about which database to choose or about how to use one.
• To find the databases that tend to be most useful for the study of hospitality and tourism, start at our Homepage and then:

1 Click on Databases by Subject

2 Click on Hospitality

You will now see a long listing of databases that are generally related to the hospitality industry.

For most topics in hospitality and tourism, you will want to begin with the database called Hospitality & Tourism Complete. This database is devoted to covering research and news relating to all areas of the field.

3 Click on Hospitality & Tourism Complete on this screen

To get started in the Hospitality & Tourism Complete:

4 Type in your search terms

5 Select search options, if necessary (see below *)

6 Press Search

Keyword search for employee retention

Ask for help if you are unsure about which search terms or options to use.

*Notes About Search Options:

• Checking the Full Text box will limit your results to only those articles that have full text available through this particular database. Doing so may produce poor results, as many hospitality-related articles are available only in print or through other databases. Therefore, it is usually better to start with this box unchecked.
  
• Checking the Peer Reviewed box will limit your results to only journals whose articles are reviewed by a panel of anonymous peer scholars before acceptance -- in other words, to what are commonly called "scholarly" journal articles. Unless your professor requires you to use only scholarly articles, it is usually better to start with this box unchecked, since a lot of useful hospitality-related information is contained in "trade publications" (that is, publications devoted to covering the industry in a specialized and educated, but not necessarily "scholarly," manner). See the Scholarly, Trade, or Popular? Rosen Research Guide for more information.

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

7 Citation (title, author, journal, date, etc.)

8 Full text link(s), if available

9 Links to other options for locating the full text

Partial results of a keyword search for employee retention

Click on the blue title of any item to learn more about it.

There are many other ways to use this database effectively and there are many other databases that may be useful for certain topics, 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.