You can use library databases to find articles on marketing plans, specifically the ABI/INFORM Collection, or eBooks from Ebook Central. Here is a list of marketing plan eBooks from Ebook Central to get you started.
For articles, first visit the library homepage and click on the 'A-Z Databases' icon (as shown in the images below):
Once on the A-Z list, you can click on the letter A, or choose Business from the "All subjects" box, then pick the ABI/INFORM Collection link.
The next step will be to generate keywords. You can start with "marketing plan" as a search term, so enter this into the ABI/Inform search box. Putting topics that are more than one word in quotation marks (" ") makes the database search it as a phrase, not just isolated words. This helps you find more relevant results. Also remember to check on the small 'Full-Text' box before hitting the 'search' button.To get a more focused list of articles, you can use other search terms for combination search, such as "marketing plan" AND (use the name of specific company or industry), or "marketing plan" AND "start ups" or "marketing plan" AND (a customer segment - see screenshot below).
Each time you enter the search terms, the ABI/INFORM generates a results list of articles. It is important to utilize the 'Limit To' option (contained at the left of the page in any results list of articles) to Narrow Results. You can narrow results by publication date (to limit to articles published in the last few years), source type (scholarly journal, peer-reviewed, newspaper, business magazine, trade journal), or document type (article, case study, industry report, conference report, interview, book chapter, etc.). Using one or more of these search options provides more focused and shorter results lists of articles for you to read through. Use the image below as a guide for using the Narrow Results options (see image below)
Click on the title of articles you are interested in to see the full text. Once you've chosen an article to include in your paper, ABI/INFORM has a 'cite' feature that will enable you to create a citation for the article in APA 7th format (it may default to MLA, so make sure you pick APA 7th, then you can copy the citation and add it to your References page). You'll see the 'Cite' icon at the top right, next to the icon to get a permanent URL to link back to the article (see image below).
