As a GA working in the UB Office of Science, Technology Transfer and Economic Outreach, here are some resources from the UB Libraries that can assist you with your research:

• Companies… find information about companies and identify comparable companies and competitors
• News… learn about recent trends and developments
• Industries… get overviews of the various facets of an industry and get a sense of the size of the market
• Journal literature… explore business topics in an in-depth manner
• Data… Obtain statistics, rankings, market share,etc

1. Company Information…

Company profiles with quantitative and qualitative info. Find competitors and major players in an industry. Remember the 3 factors that determine the difficulty of company research: public -vs- private, US -vs- non US, parent -vs- subsidiary.

• Best bet… Hoovers

• See also… OneSource, ReferenceUSA

2. News Articles…

Technology industries are continually emerging and evolving — this makes them difficult to research. Keep current with recent trends with industries and companies by monitoring the news media.

• Best bet… Factiva (includes the Wall Street Journal, Barrons, and many other primary business publications)

• See also… LexisNexis

3. Industry Overviews and Reports…

Research from the best tech-related research firms is expensive and hard to come by: Gartner, Forrester, IDC, Frost & Sullivan, Nielsen / NetRatings, Jupiter, and lots of other specialized sources. Here’s what we have access to at UB.

• Best bet… IBIS World

• See also… Faulkners Advisory for IT Studies, S&P NetAdvantage

4. Academic Journal Literature…

• Best bet… Business SourceComplete (includes journal articles plus Datamonitor reports, market research, eBooks, country profiles, more)

• See also… other business journal databases are ABI Inform Global and Business & Company ASAP. For a science and technology focus, try ScienceDirect, ACM Digital Library or IEEE Xplore.

5. Rankings, Statistics and Other Data

• Best bet… TableBase

• See also… LexisNexis Statistical, Business & Company Resource Center,

6. Internet Resources…

Some resources from the free web:

• Research… IBM Research, USC Annenberg’s Center for the Digital Future, Pew Internet and American Life Project, RAND, ClickZ Stats, Morgan Stanley’s tech research.

• Magazines… Technology Review (MIT), HBS Working Knowledge’s Technology Industry, CIO, Business 2.0, Fast Company, Wired.

• Lists… 100 Fastest Growing Tech Companies (CNN Money), Deloitte Technology Fast 500, InfoTech 100 (BusinessWeek), Fastest Growing Techs (Forbes), Canadian Business Tech 100.

Overview of business research sources for today’s presentation to law students

Company Information…

Googling a company and checking out a company’s website can be good ways to start researching some companies, but here are some resources you can use to dig deeper.

Top pick… Hoovers: ~19 million companies worldwide, public and private, small and large… Hoovers tries to capture the entire universe of companies, the whole shebang. Type in a company name and get a solid profile of it, it’s as simple as that. You can also query the database to identify companies based a number of different variables.

See also… ReferenceUSA (direct competitor to Hoovers, 14 million public and private companies in the US only), OneSource (3 million of the largest companies, public and private, worldwide), and S&P NetAdvantage (public companies only that trade on a US exchange).

News Articles…

It’s a cliche to say that the business world moves fast, but it’s true. And the best way to keep up with this fast pace of change is to monitor the business media.

Top pick… Factiva:
best database for accessing the Wall Street Journal and other top business publications like Barrons, the Economist, BusinessWeek, and more.

Top pick again… LexisNexis:
this interface may be more familiar to law students than Factiva’s.  Most business related searches are best done by clicking on the “Business” link along the top of the page.  Includes enhanced searching of SEC documents, legal cases and intellectual property information

Industry Information…

Industries can be hard to nail down — some are big and broad, others are very specialized.  Many are continually evolving and some companies are involved in multiple industries.  The government has created some classification schemes to help sort things out:  SIC codes (”standard industry classification”) were last updated in 1987 and are slowly being replaced by NAICS codes (”North American industry classification system”).

Top pick… IBIS World: industry reports on over 700 different industries based on NAICS codes

See also… S&P NetAdvantage: (see the industry surveys available in the “Industries” tab) and the Business & Company Resource Center

Journal Articles…

There are two major provides of academic journal articles related to business and UB provides access to them both — Business Source Premier and ABI Inform…

Top pick… Business Source Complete (from EBSCO): journal articles from a wide variety of business journals plus company profiles, country overviews, and SWOT analyses.

See also… ABI Inform (from Proquest)

Statistical & Financial Data…

Wharton Research Data Service (WRDS):
comprehensive current and historical financial data ranging from stock prices to company financials. This resource has a bit of a learning curve, it’s a little tricky to use (for tips and guidance, see Harvard Business School’s WRDS Guides)

TableBase:
file this one under “Misc.” TableBase grabs the charts, tables and graphs from articles published in hundreds of different resources and makes them searchable in a single interface.  See also…  LexisNexis Statistical: similar to TableBase but searches government resources

In the Summer of 2006, the University Libraries began sending older and low-use items (books and journals) to our newly constructed storage annex. Last year, Lockwood library, where the University’s business and management collection is kept, sent low-priority journals to the annex.  Later this semester, we will begin sending low-priority books to the annex.

Some background on the annex… Basically, the UB Libraries (like many academic libraries across the country) is running out of room.  Even with the transition to online, web-based, electronic resources, we have simply exceeded the capacity of the physical space in the libraries to accomodate our collections.  A common, cost-effective, efficient, user-friendly response to this issue has been to send low-priority items to an off-site storage facility like our annex.

How to request items form the annex… Use this online form to request items from the annex: Interlibrary Loan, Document Express, Annex request form.  Books requested from the annex will be delivered to the circualtion desk at any libary on campus.  If you need an article from a journal or a chapter from a book that is in the annex, the library will scan it and email it to you as a pdf (you also have the option, of course, to receive a print photocopy).  Typically,  you will receive the book or journal article within one business day.

If you’d like more info, check out the Annex FAQ or feel free to contact me directly.