Business Reference Q&A

Stats, Stats and more Stats

2006-11-28T13:04:00.000-08:00

Frequently asked question:
How can I find the number of.......?

Places to Look for Information:
The University of Michigan Gov. Docs Center has an excellent in-depth guide to Statistical Resources on the Web. This link will take you to the Business & Industry page: http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/stecind.html It covers individual industries, Advertising, Comprehensive Business Sources, Company Information, E-Commerce, Market Share, Economic data, etc. So when you can't find a particular stat, you might see which sites they recommend. They have really in-depth pages on other topics as well.

Tennessee & Alabama Highway traffic patterns

2006-11-13T17:35:00.000-08:00

Frequently asked question:
How many cars pass by this location every day?

Places to Look for Information:
I've gotten this question when working with students in the business planning class. They want to know where to locate their business and they are looking for heavily travelled roads. This site has a really great interactive map that lets you drill down to specific points along Tennessee roadways to find the average daily traffic count. http://ww3.tdot.state.tn.us/TrafficHistory/ This is historical and appears to go back to the 1980s in some cases. To use the map, you'll first need to zoom in to a location. As you continue to zoom down, you will begin to see little triangles along the roads that represent the counters. Click on the "i" identify logo in the tools menu and then click on the triangle to pull up the traffic count data.

The link to Alabama's Traffic History is http://aldotgis.dot.state.al.us/trafficvolume/viewer.htm. It looks like most states have these sites. Just use a search engine to look for Traffic Count and (state). Some states seem to provide more detail than others. Alabama's will let you see how many cars where in each lane and which direction they were travelling.

Alcohol and Tobacco Statistics

2006-11-02T13:52:00.000-08:00

Frequently asked question:
I need statistics on beer, wine, liquor, or tobacco. Where can I find this?

Places to Look for Information:
One place to consider is the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, http://www.ttb.gov/index.shtml. They have detailed stats on the industries and include regulatory information such as import rules and labeling regulations.

Replacing Jake

2006-09-20T10:37:00.000-07:00

Frequently asked question:
Is this journal available in electronic format and if so, where and what dates?

Places to Look for Information:
For many years, librarians depended on JAKE, the Jointly Administered Knowledge Environment from Yale University, to find out which databases carried a particular journal and for how long. Unfortunately, JAKE passed away in 2002. The Walker Library has been depending on our print version of Fulltext Sources Online published by Information Today and updated every six months. It's kept on our Ready Reference shelf in case you haven't had a chance to use it.

I have just found that Simon Fraser University in Canada has a service called CUFTS. It works much the same way as Jake, giving you the ISSN for a journal and the databases where it can be found in full-text format electronically and the dates. It's a nice tool to use, especially if you aren't in close proximity to our print resource. CUFTS is also linked off of the Heard Library Articles and Databases page for ease of access.

Renovation Hiatus

2006-05-20T11:19:00.000-07:00

Due to the upcoming Walker Library renovation, the Business Reference Q&A blog is going on hiatus for the summer. We will return to you in the fall to bring you up-to-date on the latest and greatest sources in business reference.

Is the stock still good?

2006-04-25T17:30:00.000-07:00

Frequently asked question:
My grandfather bought stock in Company X back in the early 1950s. I don't know if this company still exists. Is the stock still good?

Places to Look for Information:

We have the Directory of Obsolete Securities in the Walker Library Reference Collection. It covers companies that have changed their name, merged, been acquired, dissolved, reorganized, filed bankruptcy, or had their charter canceled. It then describes what action occured with the company's stock because of that change. For example, if a company was liquidated it will give the date and tell how much each shareholder received for each share of stock. Or, in the case of M&A, it will tell how many shares of stock a shareholder in one company received in exchange for shares in the other (which isn't always an even 1 for 1 exchange). This directory is a cumulative source, so there's no need to go back and check previous years if you don't find what you need in our current edition.

The SEC has a page on their website about researching old stock certificates: http://www.sec.gov/answers/oldcer.htm. There are companies that will do it for you for a fee, if the patron is willing to go that route and we haven't found what he needs in our traditional sources.

And I see that Lippincott Library recommends that people use Lexis/Nexis Classic and search the Library: BUSREF and the File:DEADCO. I haven't tried this myself, but wanted to mention it here since we do have access to Lexis/Nexis Classic.

Finally, the other "classic" source is the Capital Changes Reporter, which according to their promotional material "provides the facts and figures to compute a security holder’s gain or loss from capital changes. Covers federal tax consequences of capital changes for more than 58,000 corporations and organizations resulting from stock dividends, stock splits, reorganizations, exchanges, rights and other changes in capital structure in a database that spans over 100 years." This is produced by CCH. There is also a print version. Unfortunately, we don't have access to either here.

Tennessee Data

2006-03-29T09:46:00.000-08:00

Frequently asked question:
Where can I find data on Tennessee, Davidson County, Williamson County, Nashville or Brentwood? These are our most often requested geographic locations, except for international locations. And the data requests can run the gamut of business information from demographics, to companies and industries in the area, to local business law.

Some Places to Look for Information:

For the state of Tennessee, I ususally start with www.Tennessee.gov and use the search function on their site. The Commerce and Insurance Department Licensee Roster search is a handy tool to create a list of professionals who must be certified to practice within the state. This list covers professionals such as accountants, cosmotologists, home contractors, and real estate firms. (most other states have these databases also).

Real estate assessment seems to be another popular request lately. Here's a direct link to that page for most of the counties in Tennessee: http://170.142.31.248/. And here is the direct link to the Davidson County real estate assessment page: http://hobsvtxie01.nashville.org/Default.asp?br=exp&vr=6. You can search either by property owner name or by street address. It gives a total property value estimate, and provides a break down of the value of the land and the value of the structure on the land.

Nashville.gov has information about obtaining business licenses or doing business with metro Nashville. http://www.nashville.gov/htmlpgs/noflashhome.htm. The Nashville Chamber of Commerce also has a lot of information on their site. http://www.nashvillechamber.com/ You should know that demographics are actually located under the residential info.

For information on Williamson County or Brentwood, try: http://www.williamsonworks.com/. This site includes demographics for the county, broken down by different sectors of the county (north, south, east and west). Also, be sure to look at the "Research Data" section. It includes cost of living, workforce data, top employers, economic indicators, etc.

Middle Tennesse State University Business and Economic Research Center- http://www.mtsu.edu/~berc/home.html. This center specializes in information regarding Tennessee and the Mid-state area. Some data of note include TN economic indicators, employment, unemployment, bankruptcy filings in Middle TN District, etc. Most states have these types of economic research centers at a state-funded university, so if you're researching another state, you may look at the universities to find similar information there.

Where to look... when you don't know where to look

2006-03-01T17:14:00.000-08:00

Frequently asked question:
Question often posed by business librarians: "Where else can I look for information about_______"

Places to Look for Information:
We all get stumped by difficult questions occassionally. What we should keep in mind is that one of our colleauges here or at another institution has probably answered a question similar in nature at some point in their career. And librarians are great about sharing what they know to help someone else learn. There are so many guides, handbooks, websites, blogs, listservs, and experts that you can call on the phone when you're in a pinch that it would be impossible to list them all in one or even two postings. So, let me just start with some of my favorites and also a new one that I just learned about at ALA in January.

Encyclopedia of Business Information Sources--Ready Reference. This is my personal choice for the one reference book I would have in my collection if I could have no others. I really like the trade association information that it includes, because the TA info can be difficult to find and sometimes it is the best source of info when it is free. I think you are all familiar with it, but I didn't want to exclude it from my list.

Business Information: How to Find it, How to Use it by Michael Lavin- Ready Reference. It is old (1992) and some material is terribly outdated. But it explains very clearly business terminology from a librarian's perspective so that you can understand how to help your patrons. It used to be the book used to teach business reference. There is an updated version that business librarians have been anxiously awaiting for years, but Oryx Press was acquired by Greenwood Publishing and it's now unclear if the updated version will ever be published.

BUSLIB-L Business Librarians' Discussion List. Most often the posts submitted to the listsev are from librarians seeking help with difficult reference questions. You can also search the archive of the list to see if a related question has been asked/answered by going here: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/buslib-l.html It is highly recommended that you search the archive before submitting to the list. Other topics are discussed and if you're interested in learning more about business librarianship, it is a good way to keep up with what's going on.

Lippincott Library's Business FAQ. http://tinyurl.com/e8ayf (The URL to the site is really long, so I created a tiny URL to it. You can use this or you can bookmark it yourself when you go there). This is what I learned about at the BRASS discussion forum at ALA. It's a knowledge database of business questions and sources. For example, you might try Bonds. It will bring up all the recommended questions and answers for bonds. The interesting thing is that several libraries are now working in conjunction to build this knowledge base. NYU, Columbia, Princeton, and maybe some others are working together. I'll give more details about this at a reference meeting.

Free Business Info from Gale!

2006-01-25T18:05:00.000-08:00

Frequently asked question:
Where can I get electronic versions of the Gale publications Business Plans Handbook; Encyclopedia of Small Business; Encyclopedia of American Industries; Encyclopedia of Management; and Business Biographies?

Places to Look for Information:
Well, you would assume in our Gale database Business & Company Resource Center, wouldn't you? And you can get the Encyclopedia of American Industries in BCRC. But did you know that you can get this book and the other four COMPLETELY FREE on the Internet? While doing some research, I found a link for this site: http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/.

Volumes 1-11 of the Business Plans Handbook are available for free on the website. These aren't even included in BCRC! We currently have volumes 1-9 in print at Walker, so we're gaining access to 2 volumes that we don't already have! Incidentally, I found on the Gale Bookstore website that they have published volume 12 of this set that is not on this free website and we don't have in print.

The Encyclopedia of American Industries, which used to be considered one of *the* best sources for industry information is also included for free on the site. I believe this might be one edition behind what is available in BCRC. The book is published on a yearly basis, but each industry analysis within the book has it's own update schedule (which is not disclosed by Gale). You can only gauge their currency by reading the analyses and looking for recent developments. Gale has done such a poor job (in my opinion) of keeping the industry analyses updated within this resource, that it doesn't seem to make a big difference that the free version is a year or two behind the BCRC edition. I will say that Gale also publishes the Encyclopedia of Emerging Industries and Encyclopedia of Global Industries, only available in electronic format in BCRC.

The biographies on this free site look good. We haven't purchased the print counterpart from Gale. The print version has 600 biographies and was just published in 2004 as a first edition of this title. It costs $425.00 for the 4 volume set. It looks like it has the major business players, like Warren Buffett, Jack Welch, and Steve Jobs. I guess-timated about the number of entries in the free version, and it looks like all 600 are included.

The Encylcopedia of Small Business and Encyclopedia of Management look authoritative. And it's great to be able to offer these electronically.

It will be interesting to see if the site remains available on a free basis or if Gale decides this isn't a good business model. I would like to include this link in our updated resource guides.

Top-Rated Cities and Salary Information

2006-01-18T10:47:00.000-08:00

An update on the CareerSearch Database, which is a campus-wide resource. These two features are located under the "Other Helpful Offerings" category on the main search page.

A couple of months ago CareerSearch had pulled the Top-Rated Cities information from the database. It looks like they have now added it back. Top-Rated Cities is published by Greyhouse Publishing. The reports are rather in-depth (typically about 20-30 pages in length) and they cover many metropolitan cities within a state. They do not do their own research, but rather gather the data from several different sources, mostly government sources. I can't find out when the reports were last published. However, they always cite their data within the reports and tell you a date accessed or published. Most reports have data that range from 2001-2003.

The major categories covered for most cities: Background, Rankings, Business Environment, Demographics, Income, Bankruptcies, Employment, Taxes, Real Estate (commercial and residential), Commercial utilities, transportation, businesses, hotels, event sites, cost of living, housing, healthcare, presidential election, education, Major employers, crime rates, recreation, media (TV, newspapers, radio), climate, hazardous waste and air/water quality. Each category has more detailed information.

Salaries
Just a reminder that you can find salary information using CareerSearch. The tool is called Salary Wizard, which you can also access at www.salary.com. First, choose the type of job category and either a zip code or metropolitan area. In the next step, choose a job title (you can view a definition of the job title, including experience required). It gives you a salary range, which you can then compare to the national average or to another city. I always remind people to consider cost of living when looking at this data. For example, someone in New York will typically make more than someone in the same type of job in Nashville, but because of the higher cost of living in New York, you might actually end up with more disposable income by living in Nashville. Salary.com also includes a Cost of Living Wizard which will help you decide how much you need to make in a new location to keep your same (or higher) standard of living.

Corporate Governance Ratings

2005-11-09T14:51:00.000-08:00

Frequently asked question:
How do you find a corporate governance rating for a company?

What is a Corporate Governance Rating?
Thanks to Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, etc. for creating the need for corporate governance ratings. These ratings, done by independent research firms, aim to rate the corporate boards of public companies on several criteria. Each rating system considers different criteria, but generally they look at who serves on the board, CEO compensation, takeover defenses, etc. Some ratings companies look at as many as 60 different criteria.

Places to Look for Information:
There are basically 3 big players in the corporate governance ratings business: International Shareholder Services, The Corporate Library, and Governance Metrics International. Fortune just did a story on the ratings in the 11/14/05 issue, called "FORECASTING THE NEXT BIG BLOWUP". It's a good read to give you the basics.

Yahoo! Finance http://finance.yahoo.com/ has included data from Institutional Shareholder Services. It gives the rating, but does not explain the basis for the ISS rating (was the executive compensation deemed too high or does the make-up of the board cause concern, etc.) To locate this in Yahoo! Finance, do a ticker symbol search for a company. When the page loads, there is a link for Company Profile on the left side of the page. When you click on that link, you will see the CORPORATE GOVERNANCE section at the top right.

Bloomberg has ratings from The Corporate Library and from Governance Metrics International. The Corporate Library gives a letter rating, while GMI does a 1-10 scale. To find out more about the rating methodology, you can click on the Contributors button at the top of the page and it will tell you what is considered for each criterion. (It does not tell you what circumstances lead to the companies having the rating they did). It looks like Bloomberg just started including this information as of July 2005 (that was the date on all the ratings I checked).

To get the information on Bloomberg, you can do this search: Ticker Symbol [Equity button on keyboard] CGOV [Go button on keyboard]. Or, if you have already pulled up the Equity Screen for a company, look under the heading for company information/descriptions and then corporate governance ratings are number 17.

*special thanks to Todd Hines, University of Alabama business reference librarian, for the tip about Bloomberg having the ratings.

Browsing Publications in LexisNexis Acad.

2005-09-23T08:10:00.000-07:00

Frequently asked question:
How can you browse all articles from a publication via LexisNexis Academic? For example, how can you can retrieve all articles published in today's The Daily Deal?

Response:
I actually posed this question to LexisNexis Academic customer service (as a suggestion for a way they could improve their search interface). The response I received follows and is their recommendation for browsing a publication. It doesn't seem to be the most efficient or intuitive way to do a search, but the customer service rep. said they will be meeting soon to discuss ways to improve their interface and hopefully this will be one improvement they will make.

"Also, just to let you know that you can search a title for a specific date only. If you are looking for today’s version of a title, you can limit your search in Step Four to Today, and search the word “copyright” in the full-text. However, if you are looking for a specific date other than today, you can simply search “date is July 4, 2005” (or whatever date you are looking for). Two things about conducting this search: search full text, and do not use quotes around the search text.

For instance, searching The Daily Deal using copyright as my search term and limiting to today’s date in Step Four, I receive 43 hits. If I search Daily Deal using the default Step Four setting of previous 6 months and searching full-text in Step Three for: date is September 23, 2005. I also receive 43 hits. I tested this search on the Washington Post using the same exact search parameters, and received 234 hits in both searches.

While this does not make browsing a title for a single date necessarily easy, it does ensure that the user is receiving all the articles for that date."

Magazine Special Issues

2005-09-17T15:35:00.000-07:00

Frequently asked question:
Typically, librarians are going to be the people most often looking for special issues of magazines, but usually it is to answer a patron's question. Special issues can be full of useful industry statistics, company information, product innovations, etc. For example, the magazine Beverage Industry has a special issue called the Annual Soft Drink Report that is published every March. You don't often get a patron who asks specifically about a special issue (unless it's one of the "Top Company" special issues from Forbes or Fortune).

Places to Look for Information:
I just noticed that The Directory of Business Information Resources by Grey House Publishing has an index of special issues of magazines by industry. The index is located in the very back of the book and refers you to the listing for the magazine. The listing tells you the publisher, contact information, which month the special issue is released and the cost of the magazine when available.

I do not know how comprehensive this book is, but it looks like it covers numerous industries and sources. Some of the industries covered include: accounting, aviation, investments, metals, packaging. And even some smaller industries like dairy products, microwaves and nonwovens! Incidentally, Grey House does publish a separate Special Issues directory, but it was last updated in 2001. I don't know how much of that publication ended up in this one.

This is a very nice addition to this book as it is difficult to locate special issue information in other sources that are current and not really expensive. We do have the Directory of Business Periodical Special Issues in Ready Reference, but it was last published in 1995. Trip Wycoff, the author of that book, only offers an electronic version of this title now via SpecialIssues.com. However, it is about $400 for an academic library license to his site.

In addition to the index of special issues, this book is a great resource for finding information specific to an industry. It covers 98 different industries and gives information on associations, newsletters, magazines and journals, trade shows, directories and databases, and industry web sites. It is similar to the Encyclopedia of Business Information Sources, which we have in Ready Reference.

Mutual Funds

2005-09-15T10:33:00.000-07:00

Frequently asked question:
How do you find out what a mutual fund has invested in?

Places to Look for Information:
The first thing to consider with this question is whether they are looking at a breakdown of asset allocation, i.e. what percentage of the entire fund is invested in each type of asset (stocks, bonds, etc.). Or, someone may ask to find out exactly what stocks or bonds a particular mutual fund has invested in. Morningstar is the main publisher or most well-known publisher of information about mutual funds. It is similar to ValueLine's treatment of stocks.

For example, let's say I have a 401K that invests in TIAA-CREF's Growth & Income Fund. I want to know what the asset composition is for this fund. By using Morningstar Funds 500, I can see that 6% of the fund is cash, and stocks make up 94% of the fund. In this case, this particular fund doesn't invest in bonds. Next, I can find out the specific companies. As of 9-30-01, this fund invested most heavily in General Electric at 3.94% of the funds assets. I then get a list of the other top 25 stocks that this fund invests in; the % of assets invested in each; industry sector for that company; % yield (or how much you have lost or made on this investment this year). It also tells me the total number of stocks this fund invests in: 538.

Worldwide Patent Searches

2005-09-06T16:06:00.000-07:00

Frequently asked question:
"How do you do a world-wide search for a patent?" Okay, maybe this isn't a "frequently" asked question, but I found it interesting and wanted to keep it on radar.

Places to Look for Information:
The US Patent and Trademark Office is the "official" government site for patent searches in the U.S. However, anyone who has ever attempted to use the government sponsored site usually ends up frustrated very quickly. I recently co-taught a class with Carlin Sappenfield from the Science & Engineering Library. As we were preparing for the class, she showed me this resource, http://ep.espacenet.com, which is so much easier to search.

"In February 2005, esp@cenet® held data on 50 million patents from 71 countries. A total of 25.6 million of these patents have a title, while 26.2 million have an ECLA class and 16.6 million an abstract in English." Most of the applications began including abstracts around 1970 (Great Britain goes back to 1918). But all the US patents should be included. It's just more difficult to find them since they don't include an abstract to search. But you can always search by patent number if you have that information.

It allows you to keyword search in titles or in titles/abstracts. You can also use individual years as part of the search criteria. The only major drawback to this database seems to be that it doesn't allow you to search a range of years, for example, 1990-1994.

You can search all worldwide patents, Japan, European Union, or WIPO (world intellectual property organization) applications from the past 24 months. To make sure you are getting all the worldwide applications, it is better to search Worldwide than WIPO. See the Help section for more details about the coverage of each database.

Jon Ericson has an informational web page on the Science & Engineering site with more info and sources for Patents. http://www.library.vanderbilt.edu/patents/index.html And Rahn has done a lot of patent searches throughout her career.

Finding Business Case Studies

2005-08-18T14:10:00.000-07:00

Frequently asked question:

"I need to find a case study about....." We get this question from faculty and from students.

Places to Look for Information:

I just found this really nice clearing house for case studies, the ECCH, European Case Clearing House Online. It has studies from a number of different universities, including Harvard, Stanford, Babson, Darden, etc.

From their website: Over 24,000 cases on all aspects of national and international business and management, authored worldwide, are available in the ecch case collection. Most cases are in English, with about 250 cases also available in another language. A typical case may average between ten and thirty sides with some supporting graphics or data.

Purchase information is included on their website.

Harvard does publish their own case studies as well: http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu. We get many requests for these. We do not carry these in the library. Professors often include them in course packs for the students or they can purchase them online at relatively reasonable prices. I've seen some for around $6-7.

And this concludes this edition of Reference Tip of the Week.

Amia

Have ideas for future editions of Reference Tip of the Week? Let me know!

Business Source Premier

2005-04-13T10:57:00.000-07:00

Quirks about this Database:

We are currently running two simultaneous BSP subscriptions at Vanderbilt. The rest of campus has a subscription, which we can access, and we still have the Owen account that non-Owen people can't access. At some point in the future, I imagine these two subscriptions will fold into one (or seriously hope that they will).

BSP is supposed to be updating its interface and content. At ALA, they told us this would happen this past February. I don't know why it hasn't changed for us. I believe that some libraries are already using the new interface. I hope we can make the change this summer.

To access the campus-wide BSP subscription, go to the Heard Library Articles and Databases page and look for Business Source Premier.

In the Acorn catalog, when you type in a journal and it gives you the VUFinder icon, any links to Business Source Premier go to the campus-wide BSP subscription. If the campus-wide subscription goes down (which it sometimes does), the link in VUFinder will ask for a login and password. Please report this error to LITS via NetFix.

The Campus-wide subscription has the default page set to the basic search screen, instead of advanced search, as we do. However, the campus-wide advanced search screen expects you to use field codes (for example: SO=BusinessWeek), instead of having multiple search boxes. So, it's basically useless to people who do not know how to use field codes. The administrator for the database can choose default search screens, including the advanced search with multiple boxes. We should probably ask Dale to change the default settings for us.

The VUFinder icon actually appears in the campus-wide version of BSP, and not in ours. So, for example, if you do a search for an article from the Wall Street Journal (which only has abstracts in BSP), it will give you the VUFinder icon beside the article so you can link to the full-text of the article in ProQuest. If you haven't already, you might want to test out the campus-wide version to see this for yourself.

At Owen, the Wall Street Journal is available in full-text from ProQuest and Factiva. VUFinder does not include a link to Factiva, because this is an Owen-only database. However, ProQuest sometimes does not include all charts, graphs, etc., for articles from the WSJ, which you may be able to find in Factiva (thanks to Deborah for sharing this a few weeks ago).

An interesting side note-- BSP does not contain an abstract for every article that appears in the Wall Street Journal, so you aren't searching the WSJ comprehensively unless you go to Factiva or ProQuest. As a comparison, for April 11, 2005, BSP had 17 articles. ProQuest had 118.

BSP has a two day delay in getting the abstracts for WSJ. ProQuest has them same day. Factiva has them same-day.

An article appearing in the WSJ print edition, WSJ Online, BSP, Proquest and Factiva may be listed with a different title in any of these sources. It seems that ProQuest sometimes includes the title of a recurring column at the beginning of the title, while BSP usually leaves this off (I think). So, if you don't find an article using the exact title that someone gives you, try searching for variations of the title or do a subject search on that date.

Per Dale Poulter, please report any problems with VUFinder via NetFix on the Heard staffweb. Under "Category" there is "Other" and "VUFinder".

And this concludes this edition of Reference Tip of the Week.

Amia

Have ideas for future editions of Reference Tip of the Week? Let me know!

Economics

2005-02-16T16:26:00.000-08:00

Frequently Asked Question: "I need to find articles or working papers on (some economic related topic)." OR "I'm trying to locate this citation."

Places to Look for Information:

Yes, we all know that we have access to EconLit and NBER (National Bureau of Economic Research Papers), but here's an open source research database that you might not know about. It's called RePEc: Research Papers in Economics. It has over 143,000 working papers in economics! Some articles and book chapters are also indexed, but are not available full-text from this website. I can't say that I've ever had to use it here at Walker (yet), but I did use it while at the University of Alabama. The question earlier this week about the NBER reminded me about this source. Here is a link to the website for RePEc: http://www.repec.org/. Look at the list of contributors at the bottom of the page. Very impressive! You'll also notice that there are several separate sites that allow you to search all or part of the database. The one that I am most familiar with is called IDEAS because it allows you to search the entire database. http://ideas.repec.org/ Tonight, I just found the EconWPA database that does a nice subject breakdown, but doesn't include all the papers that IDEAS does. http://econwpa.wustl.edu/wpawelcome.html. With this site, you can easily see all the working papers on Game Theory, International trade, international finance, finance, risk, etc. And, I just noticed that they have a link to Data sets (makes me think of our Ph.D student who wanted help locating data sets back last semester).

Anyway, give it a look if you get a chance. It's kind of nice just to keep this in the back of your mind, especially when people are trying to track down citations!

And this concludes this edition of Reference Tip of the Week. :-)

Amia

Have ideas for future editions of Reference Tip of the Week? Let me know!

Business & Industry and TableBase Databases

2005-02-02T18:59:00.000-08:00

Frequently Asked Questions: What are these databases? What do they do? Why are they unique?

What are they? Both are distributed by the same company, Gale. RDS is a suite of business databases that Gale offers that stands for Responsive Database Services. I think B&I and TableBase have pretty much the same source coverage, but I have on occasion found things in one and not in the other. Moral of the story? Search both.

What do they do? Here's the official description for B&I: Business & Industry is a broad-based business information database that focuses on facts, figures, events and market information about companies, industries, products and markets. It covers a wide range of industries and is international in scope. B&I draws content from over 1000 trade and industry publications, regional, national and international newspapers, business dailies and newsletters. TableBase: currently down, so I can't tell you exactly how they describe themselves, so here's my version: TableBase takes the charts, graphs and tables from most of the same sources and converts them into alpha-numeric data that is searchable. This was a big deal several years ago when most full-text databases only had HTML instead of PDF resulting in the omission of all the graphics from the articles in electronic databases. This was especially horrific for business publications, which tend to have a ton of good information represented in visual graphics. Even though PDFs are much more prevalent today, TableBase is still useful because it makes it easy to narrow your search to the graphics.

Why do these databases have all those search boxes? Well, sometimes it is easier to scroll through the list of terms that they use to index articles and choose the ones you want. I think it's useful for students, although all the boxes sometimes intimidate them. Just remind them that they don't have to select something from every box.

How do I find the article that this graphic came from? When looking at a citation in TableBase, if you click on the graph icon on the left of the citation, you'll see the data as it was taken from the table. If there is an icon to the right of that citation, you can click on it to see the full-text of the article. This is sometimes crucial because the table doesn't always make sense taken out of context of the article.

Why use these instead of Business Source Premier or Factiva? Well, I find that they have really good coverage of marketing topics and industry information. Also, they cover some sources that the other databases don't, specifically Crain's business publications (great, well-known regional news for Cleveland, Chicago, NY, etc. http://www.crain.com/po.html#citypubs). Okay, so Crain's is in Factiva, but omits the graphs. ALSO, Business and Industry is a campus-wide resource. It is listed on the Heard Library Articles and Databases page. I often recommend it to non-Owen students. If they have trouble accessing B&I from our website, send them through the Heard page (that applies to Owen students as well). It's my understanding that TableBase is a "remote access for Owen students only/anyone at the public terminals can access it" resource, so it is not available on the Heard page. If you have any questions, let me know and I'll see if I can answer them.

And this concludes this edition of Reference Tip of the Week. :-)

Amia

Have ideas for future editions of Reference Tip of the Week? Let me know!

Historical stock prices

2004-12-16T13:48:00.000-08:00

Frequently Asked Question: "How do I find the stock price for insert company name on insert date? People sometimes ask this question for tax purposes because they have to know what the price of a stock was on the day they bought or sold it. OR sometimes people interested in mergers & acquisitions will ask this question to find out what a stock was trading at when the merger went through. Earlier this semester, I had students looking for the daily price of Fleet-Boston Financial Group in the 6 months leading up to its acquisition by Bank of America in April 2004.

Places to Look for Information:

1) Yahoo Finance. Yes, I said Yahoo Finance! Believe it or not, it's actually really good and reliable for historical stock prices. They pull their data from Reuters. It's a source that people can use anywhere, anytime (even after they leave Owen). Just go to http://yahoo.finance.com. Type in a ticker symbol for the company (they have a ticker symbol look-up if you don't already have it) and search. In the left hand column under Quotes, there is a link for "Historical Prices". It asks you to set your date range (I've seen some going back as far as 1962). Then, you can get daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, or dividends only. I've included a sample below from Ford Motor Company that explains some of the terminology*. Now, if you scroll to the bottom of the Yahoo page of quotes you will see what excites all our students: the ability to download data into an Excel spreadsheet! Just click the hyperlink and save the data. Okay, so here's the drawback to this wonderful tool: once a stock is no longer being traded (because it was acquired by someone else or has gone out of business), Yahoo and all other electronic sources dump the data and you can't get it electronically any more. It's like the company never existed.

2) So then there's CRSP, the data-intensive database provided by the Owen FMRC (Financial Markets Research Center) and managed by Cristoph Schenzler. It's currently down again, so I can't do direct comparisons. I can tell you that it doesn't dump the data when a stock stops being traded. So for the question I had about Fleet-Boston, we were able to get daily stock prices up until Dec. 31, 2003. Remember, that CRSP is only updated one time a year (in the summer) when they add in data from the previous calendar year. This past summer they added the data from Jan-Dec. 2003. Again, data is downloadable, so students love it.

3) Therefore, to get the daily prices for a stock that has stopped trading this year, you have to revert back to print. (And see the look of horror on the faces of the students). We have the Daily Stock Price Record for the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, and American Stock Exchanges, located in Reference. They are really easy to use. Companies are listed alphabetically and include the volume, high, low and close for all the trading days in the past quarter. We usually keep at least one full year in Reference.

4) I'm sure there are other sources that do this, but these are usually the ones that I use most often. I know that Factiva does this under the Quotes section of Companies/Markets, but only does daily prices back two years and a little farther back for monthly and yearly. You can use DataStream to do all kinds of stock price research, but figuring out how to do it takes some time. I'm not sure if they dump data of delisted stocks, something I need to look at further. I have a feeling that Thomson One Analytics will also do this, but I haven't tried it yet.

*STOCK PRICE TERMINOLOGY: Open is what the stock began trading at when the market opened, High and low for the day gives the extremes, and then there's the last price for the trading day, called the close. People usually want the closing price. Volume tells you how many shares were traded that day. Notice that it has Adjusted Close. This takes into account stock splits and dividend payouts so that you can directly compare prices over time. Yes, you would think that the opening price would be the same as the closing price from the previous day, but they typically aren't. Companies will sometimes wait until the market closes to announce some news (sometimes earnings reports) that will cause the price to change dramatically at the opening on the next day.

PRICES
Date Open High Low Close Volume Adj Close
15-Dec-04 14.39 14.49 14.19 14.29 8,973,000 14.29
14-Dec-04 14.27 14.39 14.22 14.32 7,521,800 14.32
13-Dec-04 14.25 14.28 14.15 14.23 5,936,500 14.23

And this concludes this edition of Reference Tip of the Week. :-)

Amia

Have ideas for future editions of Reference Tip of the Week? Let me know!

Magazine Demographics

2004-12-08T17:56:00.000-08:00

Question:

"How do I find demographics for the readers of insert magazine name here." This has been a recurring question over the past week or so. I've received questions about Men's Health and Fitness Magazine. I think Rahn had someone looking for Teen People.

Places to Look for Information:

1) A source that's really good is Magazine Dimensions, Ref. HF6105.U5 M23. It gives U.S. circulation, total number of readers (male and female), median age (male and female) and Median income (male and female). This is in Chapter 2- under the section for MRI Average Issue Total Audience, Readership by Publication.

2) Sometimes, you can find the information on the magazine's website (look for something that looks like Advertising or refers to a Media Kit*). Keep in mind that Media Kits are not always available on the magazine website and don't always have reader profiles or demographics listed even if they are available. For example, Deborah helped me find demographic info for Men's Health South Africa edition, but the U.S. print edition was no where to be found on the website! (I did eventually find demographics on Men's Health Online and the student said that was close enough). Here's a link to the Media Kit for Business 2.0, if anyone would like to see what types of information are covered. http://www.business2.com/b2/web/information/advertising

*Media KitOnline or off-line package of information for potential advertisers, including ad sizes, rates, demographics, submission information, and contact names. Definition courtesy of: http://www.marketconscious.com/dict3.htm

And this concludes this edition of Reference Tip of the Week. :-)

Amia

Have ideas for future editions of Reference Tip of the Week? Let me know!

Citation Problem for Peabody students

2004-01-29T10:00:00.000-08:00

Question:

A Peabody student came in this afternoon with a question that may come up again in the next week+. One of their classes needs two articles from the Journal of Management Consulting, volume 10 issue 4, 1999. The titles of the articles are "Client vs. Consultant" and "Engaging Engagements".

End Result:

A couple of things about the citations: 1) they leave out the issue number and 2) the citation for one of the articles is wrong, saying it was published in volume 12, but they both were published in volume 10 issue 4.

The next problem is that our bound volume is missing issue 4 from volume 10. The journal ceased publication with this issue, so that's probably why we never received it. Business Source Premier only has abstracts and the journal is not available in the ProQuest databases. I did find both articles full-text in Business Periodicals Ondisc. The CD-ROM number is 00_01_06, if you want to go ahead and pull it before you start searching.

It's a weekend class that needs the article before class the first weekend in Feb.

Amia

Directory of Foreign Companies Operating in the U.S.

2004-01-23T08:44:00.000-08:00

Question: "I need a list of Korean companies with locations in Los Angeles or in California."

End Result: The Directory of Foreign Companies Operating in the United States provides a list of foreign-based companies with locations in the U.S. The book is arranged by country, with a list of all the companies from that country listed alphabetically together. It does not divide the companies by geographic regions within the U.S., but the list is easy to browse and determine where the branches are located.