Useful articles on cultural conditions in different countries can be found with using both keywords and subject vocabulary in the following journal databases. Try combinations like ("Mexico" AND "Social life and customs"), using the subject fields, in Academic Search Complete, or ("France" AND "manners and customs"). For ABI/INFORM, a combination such as ("China" AND "Culture") will generate a number of useful articles. It is necessary to scan or look through a number of entries to find a useful set of articles. Pay attention to the indexing on individual citations; this will suggest different searches.
For searching the Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions theory/construct with respect to a particular country, search in ABI/INFORM Complete with something like the following:
(Hofstede's dimensions) AND Japan [or whatever other country]
Example:
1. Consider Boolean searching--combining your terms with AND, OR, NOT. See explanation in ABI/INFORM--Search tips--Operators, fields, and special characters.
2. Consider truncating. Most databases allow for finding variations of terms by using the symbol *. This ensures that variations of terms will appear--teen* will result in teen, teens, teenage, teenager, etc.
3. Use search limits on the right-hand side of your results page to narrow results by year, person, subject area, document type, publication title, location and other criteria.
4. If full-text is not directly available, Use the FIND FULL TEXT icon to see if an article is available online or in the library.
5. Try sorting search results by relevance rather than date to retrieve the articles that matched your search terms first.
You can find the sort by option on the upper right-hand side of your results page.
6. Review your results list and modify your search, if necessary, using terms you find in your results.
