What is the Regional Business News Database?

• Full text newswire database that incorporates around 75 business journals, newspapers, and newswires, covering all major metropolitan and rural areas across the United States.
• The dates of coverage vary within each individual publication and not all publications run through present day. Coverage for some publications begins in the early 1990s; however, other publications only have archives for a few past months. But the information that is there is updated daily.
• Has full text information for more than 50 sources and others have citations.
• Has 67 periodicals indexed and abstracted.

How/when is it useful?

• To locate current and archived business news
• To consolidate business news from various U.S. regions into one database
• To allow users to search various news sources at once
• Useful in researching a business (a business person or a lay person)
• Contains business news from many sources that would be hard to track down individually

How to search: keyword and publication

Keyword Searching

• Basic search: Enter your search terms into the blank fields. There are also a few ways to limit your search.








• Advanced Search: This search allows you to enter terms in three fields. It also contains many more ways to limit your search.

Publication Searching

• Choosing to search by publication allows you to browse through publications indexed by the database.
• When you choose a specific publication, you can search articles or citations within just that journal.

Saving your Search/ Receiving Alerts

This database allows users to save a search or save "alerts." To do so, you must create a “Change Back Account” if you do not already have an EBSCO account. An "alert" means that the database will run your search for you regularly and send you updated results.

To save a search:

• After you have entered your search terms and begun to search, click on Search Histories/Alerts tab.


• If you have not as of yet signed into your EBSCO account, the program will prompt you to do so now.
• Click on "Save Searches/Alerts" link.
• You can name your search, write a brief description of it, and save it permanently, for 24 hours, or as an alert.

To save as an alert:

• When you choose to save a search as an alert, you will be directed to a new window.
• You can then choose from pull-down menus to choose: how often you wish to receive alerts, how far into the past do you want the search to run (2 months, 5 years, etc.), and also how long you want your alert to run.
• Enter a contact point (email address) and your preferences and then hit “Save.”

Search Tips

Boolean Operators

These are words that can link your search terms together to either narrow (limit) or broaden (expand) your search.

• AND narrows a search: Searching for "Enron" AND "Skilling " will find only articles that have both terms, excluding those that include only one of the terms.
• OR broadens a search: Searching for "Enron" OR "Skilling " will find articles that have either of these terms.
• NOT narrows a search: Searching for "Enron" NOT "Skilling" will find articles that contain "Enron" but not "Skilling."

Searchable Fields

Instead of leaving "Default Field" in the pull down menu, you can change it to a different field to narrow your search. A complete list of these fields is available in RBN Database Help, but some examples are:

• AB - Word from abstract or Author Supplied Abstract, e.g., AB "Enron."
  
• DE - Performs an exact search for subject headings and author-supplied keywords describing an article, e.g., DE "stock market."
  
• CS - Performs an exact search for the value "Y" indicating that the article is a cover story. e.g. CS Y along with other search terms like DE oil ("CS oil" wouldn't work).
  
• PG - Number of Pages performs an exact numeric search for an article's page length, e.g., PG > 5.
  

Wildcards & Truncation

Wildcards are a symbol (?) that can replace a character in a word, thereby retrieving several possible letter combinations.

• For example: a search for ne?t will find results containing "next" and "nest" and "newt," etc.

Truncation, which is always represented by the * symbol, when placed at the end of a word, will replace any number of letters.

• For example: a search for "indust*" will find results containing words"industry," "industries," "industrial," "industrialization," etc.