Understanding the competitive landscape of the industry and company placement is important.  When searching for industry profiles, they ideally should contain the following:

• SIC/NAICS
• List of competitors
• Total market revenue
• Current conditions
• Some forecasts (1-5 y)

Industry profiles are usually difficult to find on the open Net, but you can find them in the following databases: 

To search for a topic, use the Advanced Search page and enter your search terms, using the drop-down menus to specify where those terms should appear inside each item in the results list. To explore topics in relation to each other, click on the Visual Search tab.  Enter a keyword, such as strategy or employment, into the Find box and hit the Search button

One of the more popular sources to search in BSU is Harvard Business Review.  Here are some easy steps to search from the digital shelf.  See screenshot below to give you an idea how this works, example is an article entitled "Eager Sellers & Stony Buyers" which was published in June 2006:

• Type in the article title in the first search box (Eager Sellers & Stony Buyers) and select TI (title) from the Drop-down menu of database fields next to the search box
• Below is a Publication Box.  Type Harvard Business Review
• To the right side is Published Date, Choose Month and Year drop-downs for the year the article was published.  For this article, 
• Click the Orange Search button on the screen

The search result should look like this (see screenshot below).  

The first one is the article itself, including a link to the PDF to download.  The second result (and there may be more, but not for this particular article) is a Letter to the Editor.  Sometimes there is a follow-up editorial note as well, also in PDF. 

You can search for other journal articles replicating these steps.  If you have trouble finding the article, feel free to e-mail the Business Information Services library team at bis@library.illinois.edu. 

At the main screen choose between logging into the industry reports or procurement reports databases by clicking its corresponding 'Login' button

Within Industry Reports, the simplest way to find industry information is to enter an industry name or NAICS code in the search box and click the magnifying glass just to the right of it.

Procurement reports can be searched by keywords or company name

In order to download articles, make sure to enable pop-ups for advance.lexis.com

To search for company profiles, select the company info box on the home page and select Company Profile from the drop-down to search for a company by name.

Mergent Online

Includes U.S. Company Data and International Company Data. Rich textual descriptions offer a wealth of detail on items including business description, history, property, subsidiaries, officers and directors, long-term debt and capital stock.

Annual reports for most companies are available back to 1996.

In Mergent, you can limit your search to companies in a specific country. On the main page, make sure the "International Company Database" box on the left side is checked. Then, click on the "Country" drop-down menu on the right side, select the name, and click search.

This is a comprehensive database of scholarly journals, magazines, trade publications, newspapers, books, reports, dissertations, and working papers. To get database help, click here and then click on various links in the left-hand navigation column such as 'Basic Search' or 'Advanced Search: Database Specific.'

For example, to search for industry statistics and reports: Search for an industry name as a subject or enter/look up NAICS code; choose "statistics/data report" as "document type";  click search.

Grainger Engineering Library Information Center's STEM Entrepreneurship & Business Services can assist you in getting started with these and other resources.  If you have any questions, please e-mail  enginlib@library.illinois.edu.

STEM Entrepreneurship offers quick video clips on how to conduct business research at http://bit.ly/1lmn5XG.   Most of the videos take 5 minutes or less to view!