Visual depiction of a BIS Librarian's suggested search strategy for finding company information using the Three Easy Steps to Find Company Information.
For resources under each step, visit the Three Easy Steps to Find Company Information.
Use the following databases to determine if the company is public, private, or subsidiary:
This is a comprehensive database of academic journals, book/monograph abstracts, company profiles, country reports, industry profiles, magazines, market research reports, newspapers, product reviews, SWOT analysis, trade publications, and videos.
To search for a company, type in the company name in the search box. Then in the Select a Field, click on CO Company Entity.
Scroll down and you can search for SWOT Analysis under Publication type or search for NAICS/Industry Code, Product Name, and Company/Entity.
Emerging Markets Information Service (EMIS)
This resource delivers hard-to-get information on more than 80 emerging markets. It aggregates and produces unique content including full-text news articles, financial statements, company information, industry analyses, equity quotes, macroeconomic statistics, and market-specific information, which are derived directly from more than 13,000 local and global publications.
To find information: first select a country or multiple countries; then click on company analysis, industry analysis, or country analysis tab; and type the name within search box.
Use this database to build a company list and search for company, industry and people profiles. Hoover's gives you access to best in class data made up of approximately 84 million private and public companies, including subsidiaries. Below is a screenshot of the company list builder and its criteria.
Search for a company in the search box or click on Build a Company List.
Includes company profiles, reports, webinars, research articles, brief forecasts, market sizing and company presentations on emerging technologies with a specialty in Internet of Things. Access is for Urbana, staff, faculty, and students currently enrolled. Students in experiential learning teams are permitted to use the resource for analysis for their projects. Authentication or credentialing is a two-step process. The link will require using the VPN server and specifically logging in under the "TunnelAll" user group, then use one of 39 already designated "seats" or usernames/password to access.
Those seats are as follows (example for the first 10 seats is pasted below). Note: this is a screenshot and not clickable links.
For the remaining 29 seats, use the same web address but insert the next number (illinois11@idtechex.com ; for the password, insert the number after the word ill and before the exclamation mark !). If you need further assistance, e-mail Becky Smith.
To find company reports, use the "company search" window on the left side of the home page. You can limit your search to companies in a specific country. 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.
Once you have found a company and reached its "company details" page; click the "filings" tab. You will see a table containing details of the company's recent filings. The icons in the "view documents" tab will provide you with various formats for viewing the filings.
If the filing you are looking for is more than 90 days old; you will need to use the EDGAR search function. In the "company search" section; select the Government Filings tab near the top of the page and enter a company name or ticker symbol.
In the "filing date search" section; specify a time frame for your search. Finally; in the "filing type" section; specify what type of filings you are interested in. (Again; Form 10-K is the government-required annual report for publicly-traded companies.)
Mergent Online also has financial ratios. Chad Boenniger at Ohio State has a good video describing how to search the database for individual companies or creating reports which compare ratios of company peers within industries for checking your work when making ratio calculations.
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.
"Business and financial data on major, non-publicly traded corporations, including family owned, private equity owned, venture backed, and international unlisted companies." Contains data on over 650,000 U.S. private companies, over 100,000 private market deals and venture capital fundings, and over 18,000 private market market investors. May search by keyword as well as by industry.
Access is free for University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign users, but you must create an account. Sign up with your university e-mail address from the main page.
Search by company name and press GO or conduct an Advanced Search by clicking on the magnifying glass on the left hand side (see red box below).
Proquest One Business is similar to ABI/Inform, but contains more industry and country reports from Barnes (which specializes in travel), Plunkett Research (broad topics) and Economist Intelligence Unit. It also has investment reports from JP Morgan and Fitch.
For your convenience, you can search for the latest articles in popular press, such as the Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, or The Economist by clicking on the Popular Publications carousel box and select the one you want by clicking on the image. You can also search for major public company profiles, or the Industry topics carousels, as seen below.
Statista offers over 1.5 million statistics and facts on more than 60,000 topics drawn from over 18,000 different sources, including market researchers, trade organizations, scientific journals, and government databases. The data is aggregated by a dedicated team of researchers and statisticians who are experts in the 20 market and industry sectors covered. For each data set, extensive source information is provided. Data sets can conveniently be downloaded as an image, pdf, Excel file, or PowerPoint.
In the search bar, type in the company name.
When the results load, you can limit the results by clicking Dossiers, Statistics, and Infographics.
Capital IQ
Capital IQ is a subsidiary of Standard & Poor's. Its database of the same name contains company and industry news, including announcements of recent mergers, buybacks, and acquisitions that did not materialize. Capital IQ also includes corporate annual reports and filings for several years and one can screen by type of filing, market capitalization, and other financial indicators.
Capital IQ is available via Margolis Market Information Lab at Business Instructional Facility (BIF). Access is restricted to current University of Illinois students, faculty, and staff. E-mail BIS on how to obtain an account. The account is not to be shared with friends, family, or project managers. It is not to be used for internships either.
Published by S&P Global, this resource provides data on public and private companies, M&A deals, and executives and boards. Gies students and faculty must sign up for your own account first to use it.
The Securities & Exchange Commission has a searchable database of publicly traded companies' filings in the US. You can search by company name or ticker (a stock exchange identifier) symbol. In addition, one can search by date ranges going back to 1996. You can use Python to data scrape. Directions are here and here.
On GitHub, there are instructions on how to parse SEC documents using R. A scholarly article also explains the Edgar R package.
Search by company name or ticker. Look for historical data (highlighted in screenshot) .
To export data from Yahoo! Finance using R, here are some instructions. Another site, Data Science Central, has instructions for importing historical data to R,
Excelr has instructions on how to extract tweets from twitter using R.
Geospatial Data offers suggestions on creating data analytics using R.
