The list above ranks the largest US cities (population over 250,000) by their poverty rates, the generally accepted metric used to designate the “poorest” cities.  Thanks goes to Cleveland for taking over the number two spot and Detroit retains its dubious “Poorest City in America” title from last year (although if you factor in the margin for error, all three cities are on very similar levels).

While Buffalo may be headed in the right direction, there’s a long road ahead before we see the Queen City on a list like BusinessWeek’s “World’s Best Places to Live.” For comparison, here’s the Census’s list of the “richest” cities, that is, cities with the lowest poverty rates:

The Census provies a wealth of data on a variety of topics.  Check out the UB LIbraries supremely useful Guide to the Census for tips on how to find the Census data you need.

1 - “Multiple criteria decision making, multiattribute utility theory: Recent accomplishments and what lies ahead” by Wallenius, Jyrki; Dyer, James S.; Fishburn, Peter C.; Steuer, Ralph E.; Zionts, Stanley; Deb, Kalyanmoy. In MANAGEMENT SCIENCE 54 (7): 1336-1349 JUL 2008.

To access this article, click here (you must be on campus of logged in to the UB network): http://mansci.journal.informs.org/cgi/content/abstract/54/7/1336

Citation in Web of Science: http://digbig.com/4xfra

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• 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.

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