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BUSS 2058: Managing Services

1. What you need to know

This page will assist you to find scholarly information and other resources to support your assessments.

Please refer to your course outline and course learnonline site for full assessment details.

2. Plan your search

Before you start searching you should:

  • Identify the main concepts within your topic or question
  • Think of alternative words or synonyms you could also search for

Watch this video (2 min 26 sec) to understand planning your search.

You can also create a mindmap or table to help you brainstorm and organise the concepts and ideas you may want to explore in your searching. Here is an example table: 

Concept Synonyms or alternative keywords

"customer perception"
  • "customer expectation"
  • "customer emotion"
  • "customer relations"
customer
  • consumer
  • client
  • shopper
"service quality"
  • "customer satisfaction"
  • "customer retention"
  • "quality of service"
"ethical issues"
  • ethics
  • "moral values"
  • "ethical aspects"
"service concept"
  • "stakeholder service perception"
  • "service outcomes"
  • nature of the service
  • "organising idea"
  • "service framework"
"service process"
  • "service activities"
  • "process management"
IT
  • "information technology"
  • "information infrastructures"

This table is a sample only and not specific to the Assessments for this study period. Once you start searching by reading your assessment instructions, you may identify relevant keywords, so you can use those keywords in your search by including or excluding some terms.

Learn more about searching:

3. What are academic references?

You have been asked to find a minimum of six academic references including at least three academic journal articles. You are highly recommended to cite and list the textbook and two other reference books that have been listed on your course outline.

APA 7 is the referencing style for this assignment. Refer to the following APA 7 online hub for help and more information.

Academic references can be referred to scholarly sources or peer reviewed (refereed). These can include journal articles, books, book chapters, reports and other academic sources. 

Wikipedia, lecture slides, YouTube, ChatGPT or other non-academic websites are NOT considered academic sources.

To find out more about academic references look at the resources below:

4. Find academic references

An example search in the library collection:

sample Library Collection search

You can refine the results of your search. From the results page, on the right-hand menu, use the Refine my results options to narrow your search. Options include:

  •  Peer-Reviewed Journals (select this option for scholarly articles)
  •  Publication Date (You may want to select a specific date range. E.g. 2019 to 2024
  •  Full text online (select this option to only include results that return the full article, and not just an abstract)

Searching tips:

  • Use quotations marks to keep words together as a phrase. E.g. "service quality"
  • Use AND (it must be typed in upper case) to connect all the concepts. This will narrow your search results.
  • Use OR (typed in upper case) to connect alternative keywords within a concept. This will widen your search results.
  • Group keywords within similar concepts together by enclosing them in brackets (or parenthesis) when using a single search box.  E.g. (ethic OR moral)
  • Attaching the asterisk * to find alternative endings of a word. E.g. ethic* will find ethics, ethical, ethically.

To learn more, explore the following resources:

By accessing Google Scholar from the library website, you can see articles that the library has access to by clicking on the Full-text at UniSA link.

Click on the Google Scholar tab and enter your search terms into the search box. Here is an example of a search:

sample Google Scholar search

On the results page, you can filter your results from the left-hand menu.

Watch the following to find out more:

Try searching using different variations of your concepts and keywords until you find relevant results. 

An example search in Business Source Ultimate:

search: "service quality" AND ethic* OR moral*

Searching tips: 

  • Place your second concept in a separate search box. E.g. ethic* OR moral*
  • In the results page, use Limit To on the left hand side to select peer reviewed journals. You can also filter by publication date or source type.

You can search through books, journals, and book series volumes. All content in Emerald is peer-reviewed.

From the Emerald: Insight home page, select Advanced search (underneath the search box in the middle of the page).

Emerald Insight advanced search

The Advanced search page will appear. Select Journal articles to view peer reviewed articles. You can add more rows to your search to add other search terms, and you can modify your searches by selecting a date range.

See below for an example search:

search: "service quality" AND ethic* OR moral*

Search tip: Place your second concept in a separate search box. E.g. ethic* OR moral*

5. How to write an essay

Watch this video (2 min 53 sec) for an overview on essay writing.

5. How to write a report

Watch this short video (2 min 53 sec) for tips on how to write a report or access the overview document at the bottom of this box.

7. Referencing support

Managing your references

What do you do with all those references you have found? You can use a bibliographic management software to store, organise, and cite your references.

There are many free systems available. The Library supports the bibliographic management tool EndNote. EndNote automates citing your references and allows you to create and organise a library of references. For more information and to download the software, check out the EndNote Guide: