Go to www.bis.uni-oldenburg.de and click on the link "Oldenburg catalogues", which will take you to the Orbis catalogue containing the books in our library. Alternatively, the Orbis catalogue can be searched directly on the computers in the library.
Try out different keywords to see which sources are available in the library. In this way, you can find textbooks, anthologies and dissertations, for example, which can provide a good introduction to a topic.
However, the actual academic discussion of a topic takes place in specialist journals. This is why the further research steps concentrate on this type of source.

The wiso database offers a good introduction to the German-language literature. You can find this database by clicking on the subject portal "Economics" at www.bis.uni-oldenburg.de and then selecting "Wiso-Net" under "Databases".
This database contains books, articles and press articles. The latter are generally not relevant for a scientific paper. A few scientific articles are available as full texts in the database. You can download these (some of them free of charge). Otherwise, proceed as follows:

• If you find a journal article, use the Orbis catalogue mentioned under 1. to look under the heading "Advanced search" and the search field "Title keywords journals" to see whether the journal mentioned is available in the library. You can then view or copy the article there. If the journal is not available in the library, try to obtain the article using the options described under 3 and 6.
• If you find a book, try the procedure described in points 1 and 5.
• If you find an article in an edited volume, you only need to identify the title of the volume. You can then search in the same way as for any other book (see above). Articles in edited volumes are generally less relevant than articles in peer-reviewed journals. If an edited volume article is difficult to access, check whether it is worth the effort to obtain it.

Business Source Premier is one of the most important databases. It contains a very large part of the internationally relevant business literature. The great advantage is that many articles are available as full text. This means that as soon as you have found an article, you can download and save or print it immediately. This saves an enormous amount of research, ordering and copying time. With Business Source Premier, the University of Oldenburg has a de facto journal collection that only a handful of university libraries worldwide had a few years ago. You can find this database by clicking on the subject portal "Wirtschaftswissenschaften" at www.bis.uni-oldenburg.de and then selecting "Ebsco" under "Datenbanken" and clicking on "EBSCOhostWeb" and "Business Source Premier".
The restriction "Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals", which can be set under "Refine Research", concentrates the search on academically peer-reviewed journals. Virtually all good journals are peer reviewed, so this can be a useful filter.
For interesting articles, you can also see who has cited this article (Times cited in this database) and which articles have been cited (Cited references). EBSCO is currently only available on the university campus.

Not all relevant journals are available via EBSCO. The Electronic Journals Library of the University of Oldenburg therefore offers another important service. All available electronic journals are listed at www.bis.uni-oldenburg.de and in the menu bar under "Journals Online". You can either search for a specific journal using the search menu or look alphabetically for relevant national and international journals under the subject area "Economics". The different traffic light colours indicate the availability of the articles: "yellow" means, for example, full-text access on the university campus and "red" means access to references and abstracts.
Current issues are often only made available online with a certain time delay. You should therefore check whether a hardcopy version is available in the library.

Sometimes you will find books that seem very important to you but are not in the Orbis catalogue mentioned under 1. In this case, you can order the book via interlibrary loan: www.gbv.de. Please note that the books usually take two weeks to become available.
If you are in a hurry, select: www.subito-doc.de Delivery within 24 hours, up to 9 euros per book. In addition, the search is not limited to the regional network of libraries - as is the case with the GBV catalogue - but covers the whole of Germany as well as Austria and Switzerland.

Some articles that you have come across may seem particularly important to you, but are not accessible via the steps mentioned above. In this case, you can use the catalogue www.gbv.de to search for the relevant journals and order an individual article from them. Interlibrary loan coupons are available in the library or can be ordered online via your library user account. Your user account will be debited - you pay when you collect the items.

Do not limit your research to piling up literature. Some things can only be searched for specifically if you are familiar with the topic. This applies, for example, to certain technical terms and author names. By analysing the texts, you will find relevant keywords that you can use to go back to point 1. For example, if you have only found a few sources under the term "intrapreneurship", you will realise when reading the texts that the term "corporate entrepreneurship" obviously means something similar. You will find completely new sources with this keyword. Therefore, you should always plan phases in which you can read a few articles or at least abstracts.

Take a look at the bibliographies of the books or articles that seem particularly relevant to you. Search the bibliographies for sources that could be interesting due to their title, author or the reputation of the journal. Also look up sources that are repeatedly cited.

The Social Science Citation Index is a very comprehensive database. The vast majority of relevant international journals are listed here - often with an abstract. What is special about this database is that every link is systematically recorded via a citation. This means that you not only know which articles the article cites, but also from which articles the article is cited.
You can find this database if you click on "Economics" under the subject portal and then call up the "Social Science Citation Index" under "Databases".
When searching the bibliographies mentioned under 8., the search can only run in the direction of the past: Young sources give reference to older sources. The advantage of the SSCI is that you can also work the other way round.
Starting with some older sources, you look at who cited them and work your way towards the present. In this way, for example, you can see which very recent articles have cited a classic relevant to a particular topic.

An additional function can be the search with the beta version of the Google science search engine, which you can access with this link: scholar.google.com/.
You can use keywords or author names to search for additional sources. You may be able to download working papers that are not otherwise available. Documents that cite a specific entry are also listed here. This means that you can also conduct research here in a similar way to the SSCI, albeit on a much more modest scale.
However, do not proceed according to the motto, the more remote the source, the more valuable. If a scientific article is significant, it will usually be published in a highly visible place, i.e. in a good journal. If you have completed the above steps, you should have gained a good insight into your chosen topic. Nevertheless, in the course of writing a scientific paper, new subject facets, author names, lines of argumentation and keywords typically emerge that were not initially recorded. Consequently, a business management topic also touches on neighbouring disciplines such as Economics, Sociology or Psychology. For this reason, the research procedure described must be run through several times in a modified form.
In view of the wide-ranging research possibilities that are now available, the literature work is also exposed to the danger of getting out of hand. Symptoms of this are

• A great many remote sources such as working papers and insignificant anthologies have already been processed.
• The search for new sources replaces the search for new findings.
• There is a lack of quality standards and selection criteria for sources.
• The majority of research activities only bring to light sources that have already been found elsewhere.

In order to find the right balance between careful literature work and excessive research, the following points of orientation may be helpful:

• Orientation towards the research question: What contribution do the sources make to answering the guiding question of the thesis? If this is not clear, the source does not have to be taken into account.
• Reputation orientation. Concentrate your search on the relevant, peer-reviewed journals.
• Time orientation. Set yourself a deadline for when you will start writing. The process of writing puts your thoughts in order and thus focusses your research.
• Orientation towards comparable projects. Analyse a current, high-quality article from your subject area. If you have used significantly more relevant sources on the individual aspects of the topic than are listed in the article, you have probably already researched the topic well.