Q. How can I find business case studies?

There are four subscription resources which contain good collections of business case studies. These are often selected by academics for use in teaching, but can also be used by students for research:

• Brunel has access to Emerald Emerging Markets Case Studies published in 2020, 2021 and 2022. To search for these, access Emerald via the Databases A-Z, select Case studies and follow the links. You can filter using options at the right of the page to only content you have access to.
   
• The database Henry Stewart Talks Search Results: | HSTalks (brunel.ac.uk) contains video lectures discussing many business related topics.  A subset of these (339 at the time of writing) are case studies.  These included Extended form case studies, Interviews & Projects and Bite-size case studies.
   
• Bloomsbury Fashion Business Cases Bloomsbury Fashion Central - Bloomsbury Fashion Business Cases (brunel.ac.uk) is part of Bloomsbury Fashion Central.  At Brunel we have access to 284 cases on a variety of business topics, with a fashion industry focus. The cases were published between 2018 and 2021 and are a mixture of Introductory, Intermediate and Advanced  
   
• Bloomberg for Education has a range of cases on financial topics, which can be accessed by setting up a Bloomberg for Education account with your Brunel email address. Academics can get a Professor account to get access to teaching materials related to the case studies
   
• The Financial Times website (ft.com), to which Brunel has a premium subscription, has created several short teaching cases. In time we hope there will be a webpage listing all of these, for now we're linking to them individually:
  Business school instant case: Silicon Valley Bank | Financial Times (ft.com)
  Live teaching case: BP’s decision to adjust its climate change targets | Financial Times (ft.com)
  MBA case study: fixing pharma in Gabon | Financial Times (ft.com)
  Case study: how sharing risks can save lives (ft.com)
  The FT are currently producing a series of month teaching case studies about sustainability dilemmas:
  Business school teaching case study: can green hydrogen’s potential be realised? (ft.com)
  Business school teaching case study: how electric vehicles pose tricky trade dilemmas (ft.com)
  Business school teaching case study: is private equity responsible for child labour violations? (ft.com)
  Business school teaching case study: Unilever chief signals rethink on ESG (ft.com)
  Business school teaching case study: can the fashion industry be more sustainable? (ft.com)

Teaching notes are available for academic staff to use in some resources. Ask your Academic Liaison Librarian to find out how to get access to these, if there are not clear instructions on what to do on the website.

You could search for cases published in journals and books.

Books

Text books often contain short case studies.  Look at the text books for your modules, and/or browse through text books on the shelves in the relevant area of the Library to see if they have a business case study on what you're looking at.  Try searching on the Library search (the search box on the Library homepage).

This preset search within the Brunel Library search lists over 500 e-books with case studies published in the past 5 years which have the subject terms management or business and economics.  Use this search (which you can edit) and add relevant keywords to the search box - you could also change the dates to find older case studies.

Lots of the e-books will only be available for one person to use at a time, or a small number of people.  For e-books which will be available to many multiple users, check e-book collections, such as: Edward Elgar and O'Reilly (listed on the Databases A-Z)

Journals

• The journal database Business Source Premier has an option to limit to Case studies.  Access Business Source Premier from the Databases A-Z on the Library website then scroll down the screen to find the option to limit by Document Type. Select Case study from the list. You can type a keyword into the search box, or leave this blank and search for all documents categorised as case studies.  Use the filter options at the left of the results page to limit to Full text, so that you only see results you have access to.  Note that a significant number of results are in Harvard Business Review, which can be used for student research but not for teaching 
   
• The Open Access journal, Journal of Business Case Studies, may contain relevant studies.  This is included in the E-journal A-Z (use the Journals tab on the Library Search box on the Library home page) but basically the case studies are freely available on the journal’s website

Depending on the reason you're looking for business cases for, you may find it useful to look in some of the market research databases, as these have reports on companies, markets, industries, consumers and economies

All the databases recommended are listed on the Databases A-Z.

For further help in using any of the resources described above, and to discuss other resources, please contact your Academic Liaison Librarian.