Secondary Marketing Research Certificate

Find links to resources and questions to guide your exploration.

Literature Searching Tools

Start your research project with reviewing literature already published on a topic. Literature  in this context includes scholarly journals, trade publications, magazines, newspapers, books, as well as white papers written by experts in a field, reports by research organizations, and more.

Questions to Explore

1. Search for a topic, for example food trucks.

2. Review the results to locate relevant content, for example articles on consumer behavior related to food trucks.

3. Review filtering options on the left to make your results more precise.

4. Evaluate your results from the geographic focus and the purpose of your research project (e.g. are you working on a general topic overview or a business plan)?

5. Start a list of terminology / keywords describing food trucks.  This will help you better understand importance of keywords and searching capabilities / limitations of different resources that you will explore later.

Google Scholar

  • Google Scholar includes academic, scholarly content from journals, books, conference proceedings, open access repositories as well as patents and lederal and state case laws.  
  • Google Scholar does NOT include trade publications.
  • You may find experts on a topic using Google Scholar.

Questions to Explore

1. After you associate yourself with the UTSA Libraries as described above, search for food trucks.

2. Review the results:

google scholar food trucks

3.How many other articles cited this article?  This is a way to locate new research on a topic.

4. There are two versions of full text available on the right-hand side - open access on a publisher site and through the UTSA Libraries.

5. Review filters on the left.  Can you limit to the last 5 years?

6. Go to the Main Menu in the top left corner and switch your search from Articles to Case law. Can you find Texas cases related to food trucks in the last 5 years?