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Martha S. Grafton Library

Business: How-To Guide: Company Research

A guide to resources for business research.

Introduction

This page will demonstrate how to research a specific company in three of Grafton's resources:

Factiva

Mergent Online

Business Source Complete

Lexis-Nexis

Factiva

There are two ways you can use Factiva to find industry information: browse for reports and search the news.

Browse for Reports:

1. On the Factiva homepage, run your mouse over the Companies/Markets tab, then click on the Company link. 

2. Start typing in the name of your company. It should pop up in a drop-down menu. 

3. This will then bring up a report with a company snapshot, news, key developments, peer comparison, financial results, and a tool to make your own reports.


Search the News:

This will search the news for your industry. Before we begin, go back to the Factiva homepage. You can do this by clicking the "Search" link in the top menu bar.

1. First, we want to limit our search by company. So go to the "All Companies " link, with the little blue triangle below the big search box.

2. Then start typing the name of your company. Once you start typing, you should see it appear in a drop-down menu. Click on the version in the drop-down menu

3. Then, go back to the big search box at the top, and type in keywords for whatever you'd like to research about your company.

Mergent Online

Using Mergent to find company reports is pretty simple. On the homepage, use the "Company Search" box to search for your company. Usually when you start typing in a name, a drop-down list of potential matches will come up, and you can select one of those.

Business Source Complete

There are two ways you can use Business Source Complete to find information on companies: one, a Company Information report, and two, a general search for articles about the company.

Company Information:


1. Select the Company Information button in the blue menu bar at the top of the page.

2. Search for your company name, and you should come up with a list of possible matches.

3. You may only get basic information from this report. See the contents to help with navigation of the different types of information.


Article search:

Search for your company by its name, using the default "Select a field (optional)" search. You might want to put quotes around your company name when you do the search, such as searching for: "wyndham worldwide". This will ensure that you'll only get search results with that have your search terms together as a phrase, and not split up. 

If you want to limit your search results even more, you can do a "company entity" search (see image below).

Once you've done a search, you can refine your results by using the "Refine your results" bar on the left-hand side of the page. If you're searching for a specific company, try refining by company name  (see image below). The "Subject: Thesaurus Term" will also help you narrow your articles to more specific topics within your search.


Lexis- Nexis

There are three ways you can search for company information in Lexis-Nexis.

1. Use the "Get Company Info" search box on the main page.

2. Use the side bar to do specific types of company searches:

3. Search for articles on a specific company.

Go to the Power Search in the upper left-hand side of the main page.

Select the "Company" link, then enter in the name of the company in the new box that pops up. Lexis-Nexis will bring back a list of possible companies. Select one of those, and add it to your search. Then you can enter your search terms in the "search terms box" and perform the search.

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