Answered By: Alice Cann
Last Updated: 25 Sep, 2023     Views: 1128

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:

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.

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 nearly 1,000 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.

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.