Company Research Chart
Company Research Databases
The chart below displays databases with company information that BIS subscribes to annually. The chart provides the broad topics which are available within each database. To access the database desired, click on the database title to take you to the database. If you are off campus, you will be required to type your Illinois Net ID and password first for authentication.
If you're having trouble accessing a database or getting an error code, try opening the link in an incognito or private window. For further assistance, contact bis@library.illinois.edu.
| Database | Company Information | Revenue/ Financials | Industry Codes | Products | Competitors | Investment Analysis | SWOT Analysis | Comparisons | News | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Business Source Ultimate | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | |||||
| Emerging Markets Information Service (EMIS) | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | |||||
| Hoover's | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ||
| Data Axle/ Reference Solutions |
✔ |
|
✔ | ✔ | ||||||
| PrivCo | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | |||||
| ProQuest One Business | ✔ | ✔ | ||||||||
| Statista | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Company Research Databases
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. Click on All Fields and scroll to
Company Entity - CO.
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 click the menu on the left of the screen.
Click on Markets.
Here you can search for industry and/or country profiles by category or by entering keywords.
Scroll down to see profiles organized by country and region.
To search for company information, go to the menu and click Companies.
Search for a company by typing in the search bar.
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.
This resource connects users to over 60 million individual business records and over 298 million consumer records and 329 million historical business records. A variety of demographic factors can be used to create custom lists that can be downloaded directly to Excel or rendered within graphs, charts and heat maps. This database is ideal for entrepreneurial planning, market research, GIS mapping projects, job-seeking activities, gauging economic trends and more.
Click on US Businesses.
Do a quick search in the database:
You can also do an advanced search, which allows you to filter by keyword/SIC/NAICS, geography, financial data, ownership, etc.
"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 typing a company name at the top of the page or click on Company in the dropdown menu under Search on the right of the screen.
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.
Yahoo Finance!
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.
SEC-EDGAR Public Filings
Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval—known as EDGAR—is the electronic filing system created by the Securities and Exchange Commission to increase the efficiency and accessibility of corporate filings. The system is used by all publicly traded companies when submitting required documents to the SEC. Corporate documents are time-sensitive, and the creation of EDGAR has greatly decreased the time it takes for corporate documents to become publicly available.
Most common filings:
10K-annual statement of financials - generally in the Notes to Consolidation of Statements, or legal factors, management discussion. Audited statements.
10Q-Quarterly statement of income and balance sheet information. It is a snapshot of the company's financial performance, but it is unaudited.
8K- Current News or events that may affect the financial health of the company
20K - annual report of financials for non-US companies which file on the various US exchanges. However, their filing requirements are less robust than for US companies.
Example of a simple company search, looking for 10Ks
After searching for a specific company, you can find the company profile in EDGAR along with its filings. The default view shows the latest filings and popular selected filing types (right box) Also, one can view latest documents by clicking the green button "View Filings.".
Results
Click on 10K-and 10Q filings in the right box.
Then scroll down the list and look for 10K.
Certain marketing data items are in the operations expenses of the income statement. Those include either "marketing" but more common, Cost Sales or Cost of Revenue. If not broken out by those two items, it may be under "Sales & General Administrative Expenses".
If one is searching for Research & Development expenses, those are generally also in the Operating/Operations Expense section. Not all companies will have research and development expenses, especially if it is a service company as opposed to a goods-oriented company.
Extracting Tweets from Twitter
Excelr has instructions on how to extract tweets from twitter using R.
Geospatial Data offers suggestions on creating data analytics using R.