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Business Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility

A University of Lethbridge Library guide to resources related to business ethics and corporate social responsibility.

About searching for CSR practices in articles

Searching for articles about a company can illuminate the research or reporting done by others on their sustainability practices. Check newspapers, trade publications, and research articles for the company name paired with some keywords around social responsibility, ethics, and/or sustainability. You never know what you might find! Be sure to also search within the Company and Industry help guide which will give you financial, competitive, and other pertinent information about your company/industry.

Finding Journal Articles

Published research may be referred to as: journal articles, scholarly articles, academic articles, or peer-reviewed articles. No matter how your professor refers to it, she/he/they are tasking you with finding information by a subject expert that has passed through a peer review process before being published. 

Articles are valuable because they can be published more quickly than books, and thus contain newer studies and more recent research findings.

 

Sifting Through Your Search Results

After entering your key words in the library homepage's search box, you may have a list of thousands of items to look at. Stop and use the tick boxes to see only Scholarly & Peer-Reviewed sources of information.

Second, scroll down the list in search of intriguing titles. Use the big blue Quick Look button to read the abstract (summary) of any article that interests you.

 

Keep Track of Interesting Titles

Close the Quick Look to return to your results list. To the right of the title, you will see a bookmark icon. Hover over it, and the words Save this item will appear. Click on it, and the bookmark will become blue.

On the top right of your result screen, a black bookmark will appear with a superscript number beside it. The number represents the number of bookmarked articles, and you can click on this icon to see your title list. You can export this list by printing or emailing it.

Be careful! This saved title list gets wiped clean when you close your browser, and your bookmarks will be lost.

 

Full-Text Online

Instantly open and read any article by clicking the Full-Text Online button. This link will take you inside of the subscription database containing the article.

If you don't see this button on a title, it means we don't have instant access. Instead, we will need two to three business days to retrieve the article for you. Simply click the Submit Interlibrary Loan button. You will receive a link or PDF in your ULeth email.

 

Ready to search in a database? Visit our Databases by Subject page.

Library databases for trade, news, and research articles

These are a few places to get you started, but we have many more business-related databases listed under 'databases by subject' including many general business databases. Sustainability is often included in a more general corporate responsibility report so try searching {sustainability OR "corporate responsibility" [company name]} - and if you get too many hits, even "sustainability report" OR "corporate responsibility report" [company name]. 

Websites with articles & company information on sustainability & ethics

There are several 'free' internet sites which are concerned with business ethics and corporate social responsibility. 

Some good sites to check out for articles and reports are listed below; further down are searchable databases if you are looking for information on a particular company or industry.

Database Searching