Research Guides: CS 3604 Research Resources: Searching Databases

Finding Case Studies in CS

When you search for case studies online, you'll often find that prominent business schools (such as Harvard, or UVA) will charge $6-$20 for a single case study. However, several library databases grant you access to authoritative and interesting case studies of all types:

Business Source Complete from EBSCOhost
- This link opens in a new window
Business Source Complete is a citation, abstracts, and full-text database that indexes journals; books; financial data; reference works; conference proceedings; company, industry, investment, marketing, and country reports; SWOT analyses; and case studies. Full text is provides as HTML and PDF. You can limit to peer-reviewed sources. 1886-present; most content is 1980s-present.

Business Source Complete is a scholarly business database, providing the leading collection of bibliographic and full text content. As part of the comprehensive coverage offered by this database, indexing and abstracts for the most important scholarly business journals back as far as 1886 are included. In addition to the searchable cited references provided for more than 1,300 journals, Business Source Complete contains detailed author profiles for the 40,000 most-cited authors in the database. Journal ranking studies reveal that Business Source Complete is the overwhelmingly superior database for full text journals in all disciplines of business, including marketing, management, MIS, POM, accounting, finance and economics. Additional full text content includes financial data, books, monographs, major reference works, book digests, conference proceedings, case studies, investment research reports, industry reports, market research reports, country reports, company profiles, SWOT analyses, faculty seminars (videos), and more.

IEEE Xplore
Use "case study" as a keyword.

Recommended CS Databases

VT's University Libraries has nearly 1,000 databases! In order to select the databases most relevant to your research topic, it can help to visit the Computer Science subject guide, which will point you in the right direction, in addition to highlighting basic reference texts related to CS.

I also recommend that you include the following databases in your search, after browsing the CS Subject Guide for some initial ideas:

Computer Science Subject Guide
Use this guide to perform background research to refine a research topic, confirm terminology, and get a general understanding before finding books and articles to support a research project.
IEEE Xplore Digital Library
IEEE Xplore is a digital library providing full text access to the world’s highest quality technical literature in electrical engineering, computer science, electronics, and related disciplines. IEEE Xplore contains full text documents from IEEE journals, transactions, magazines, letters, conference proceedings, standards, and IET (Institution of Engineering and Technology) publications. Full text content is provided as PDFs. 1893-present, full text from 1988-present.

ACM Digital Library
- This link opens in a new window
Journals, newsletters, and proceedings from the Association of Computing Machinery in PDF. Search, or browse by title. 1954-present.
Engineering Village
Engineering Village is the search interface to three engineering databases: Compendex, Inspec, and Knovel. Compendex (1884-present) indexes citations and abstracts from over 5,000 engineering journals, conference papers, books, patents, dissertations, and technical reports. Inspec (1898-present) indexes citations and abstracts from journal articles, conference proceedings, books, and dissertations in engineering and physical sciences. Knovel provides ebooks on engineering and related subjects.
Academic Search Complete from EBSCOhost
- This link opens in a new window
Academic Search Complete indexes citations, abstracts, and full text from journal articles, books, reports, and conference proceedings in all subject disciplines. Full text provided in PDF and HTML. Searchable cited references are provided for nearly 1,000 journals. Searches can be limited to peer reviewed sources. Indexing 1887-present, most full-text content 1980s-present.