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BUSS 2065: Operations Management for Business

What you need to know

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

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

Critical reflection

If you're not familiar with critical or reflective writing as an assignment task these resources may assist you in understanding what is required.

Critical thinking and writing resources

Figure depicting the DIEP approach to critical thinking, explaining the acronym D (describe), I (interpret), E (evaluate), and P (plan).

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

Using a mindmap or table can 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

"manufacturing organisation"

 

 

"service firm"
  • manufacturers
  • goods production

 

  • "consumer service"
  • "business service"
"online business"
  • e-commerce
  • e-business
  • "online retailer"

"product design"

 

"service design"
  • "product development"

 

  • "service process design"

"making products and delivering services"
  • manufacturing
  • "service innovation"
  • "service blueprinting"
"order winners"
  • competitive advantage
  • service winning criteria
"order qualifiers"
  • basic services for market competition
"capacity planning"
  • determining size capacity
  • "capacity availability"

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. You can use those keywords in your search by including or excluding some terms.

More help

What are academic sources?

You must attribute every assertion made in your argument to the relevant source(s)/reference(s). Each answer should have at least two academic in-text citations

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 sources look at the resources below:

Find academic references

An example search in the library collection:

Search: ("order winner*" OR "order qualifier*") AND manufactur*

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. "order winner"
  • 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. (order winner OR order qualifier)
  • Attach an asterisk * to find alternative endings of a word. E.g. "order winner*" will find order winner and order winners.

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:

("order winner*" OR "order qualifier*") AND manufactur*

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.

See below for an example of a search:

"order winner*" OR "order qualifier*" AND manufactu*

Searching tips: 

  • Place your second concept in a separate search box. E.g. manufactur*
  • On 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:

"order winner*" OR "order qualifier*" AND manufactur*

Searching tip: Place your second concept in a separate search box, e.g. manufactur*.

How to write a report

Now that you have done your research it is time to put all of your information together.

Watch this video (2 min 53 sec) on report writing:

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: