Answered By: Research support team
Last Updated: Mar 18, 2022     Views: 46

The first step is to determine what leader you want to write about. If you do not have one in mind already, you could try:

•    looking through this eBook in the RRU Library 100 Great Business Leaders. Each chapter talks about the leadership style and traits of a different famous leader.

•    running a Google search for something simple like ‘top global ceo’ and pick a person that way. You should probably not use other information from those websites’, unless you are confident they are reputable, but this should be a good way to identify a person to focus on.

Next you need to find information on that person's leadership style and personal characteristics. You could search:

•    Discovery – the main search box on the library homepage
•    Google Scholar – making sure to use the link to it on our homepage so you can take advantage of the ‘Full-Text @ RRU’ links.
•    The business-specific article collection, ‘Business Source Complete’.
•    The business-specific article collection, ‘ABI Inform Collection’.

To make sure your search is focusing on the specific person you're interested in, try putting their full name in quotation marks. So, for example, you could try searches along the lines of either:

•    “warren buffett”

or
•    "warren buffett" AND leadership

Putting the name in quotation marks tells the search engine that you are interested in those words in exactly that order. This will prevent you from finding articles about all people with the name Warren or the name Buffett.

Make sure to use the filters on the left side of your results. In the library-specific tools (Discovery and the two business-specific databases but not Google Scholar) you can filter by date and by document type (book or article, for example). In Google Scholar you can only filter by publication date.

Another way to find information on a specific global leader is to use the Advanced search function in either of the business-specific article collections listed above and use the dropdown menu to focus your search on peoples' names. This will be a more precise search that typing "warren buffett" into the search box, but it will also not be as thorough.

The trick to making this search strategy work, though, is that you need to list the last name first and the first name last. Here is an example of what this search can look like in Business Source Complete.

I hope that helps. Let us know if you have follow up questions.

Still have questions? Ask us!

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