Looking for specific information about how a company operates can be as frustrating as searching for a needle in a haystack. Business and Company Resource Center is an excellent database to use when you are ready to stop searching and start finding.

If you’ve used Business and Company Resource Center to research a company, you probably tried a “Company” search. This makes complete sense. From this search, you probably found a lot of company basics – address, annual sales, number of employees, and a few article categories down the left side of the page. Useful, but not all that exciting.

The real magic in the database is in the “Articles” search. If you do an “Articles” search for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc., for example, you will get 1175 articles. If you just want to see these articles in chronological order, just click on the “View 1175 articles” button. However, if you are looking for more specific information, click on “Narrow by Subdivision” button. This takes those 1175 articles and actually categorizes them by topic. Here you will find hard to research categories such as “human resources management,” “forecasts and trends,” and “economic aspects.”

To access Business and Company Resource Center:

1. Go to www.library.drexel.edu
2. Click on Databases/Articles
3. Choose Business and Economics
4. Click into Business and Company Resource Center

Note: if you are off campus, you will be prompted for your last name and Drexel ID number.

The “Articles” search also works for industries as well as companies. Give it a try.

* Originally published on November 17, 2005. For business research tips & tricks in real-time, subscribe to LIB-BIZ-KIT .

If Dr. Gregory House was a librarian instead of a doctor, he would limp angrily through the library stacks. He would stash his Vicodin pills in books with call numbers that start with RM138.

Librarian Gregory House would slash his cane in the air, and proclaim, “Citations lie!”

And yes, he would be right. Citations do lie. In fact, they lie all the time.

To us it looked like a perfectly professional and reasonable citation. But Librarian Gregory House would jab his finger at the citation, and proclaim, “This citation is lying! Health Marketing Quarterly is a QUARTERLY publication, so it will only come out four times a year! There is no seventh issue!”

After a quick investigation, and popping a pill, Librarian Gregory House would say, “That article titled ‘Choice experiments, site similarity and benefits transfer’ from Environmental and Resource Economics was written by Robert J. JOHNSTON, not Robert J. JOHNSON.”

Frequently, at the reference desk, Librarian Gregory House would look disgusted. “Yes, Anne Perkins has an article in the Harvard Business Review called ‘Bemoaning the Rotten Client’” he would concede. “But it was written in 1993, not 1953! Citations lie!”

It would seem like magic to us — the way he’d hunt down the proper citations. But if we asked very nicely, Librarian Gregory House might explain his process for correcting faulty citations:

1. He would try to find the article with the given citation by searching for the journal using the library catalog.
2. If that search didn’t find the article, Librarian Gregory House would then try a quick Google Scholar search for the citation. He would not look for the actual article, but just a reference to the article.
3. If he found a reference to the article, he’d compare the original citation to the Googled citation to see if there were any discrepancies.
4. When faced with a particularly difficult citation case, he might call for a consult with other librarians at the reference desk, either in person, or by calling 215-895-2755.

For more about finding full article from a citation http://www.library.drexel.edu/resources/tutorials/findingfulltext.html

Google Scholar
scholar.google.com

For more about House
http://www.fox.com/house/

*Originally published on October 19, 2007. For business research tips & tricks in real-time, subscribe to LIB-BIZ-KIT.

drexbizlibrarian: JTLYK, I am signed up for both
drexbizlibrarian: Yahoo Instant Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger.
drexbizlibrarian: Maybe it’s NBD, but it is time I get on with the 21^st Century.
drexbizlibrarian: I will be on IM generally on weekdays from 8am to 5pm
drexbizlibrarian: Of course, we can also meet F2F either at my office – Room 315 Hagerty Library
drexbizlibrarian: Or talk OTP at 215-895-6164.
drexbizlibrarian: BTW you can speak to a reference librarian at the reference desk 7 days a week, including weekday evenings and weekends.
drexbizlibrarian: 215-895-2755 or qmlib@drexel.edu
drexbizlibrarian: TTYL

Yahoo IM: drexbizlibrarian
AOL IM:    drexbizlibrarian

* Originally published on July 21, 2006. For business research tips & tricks in real-time, subscribe to LIB-BIZ-KIT.

The April 27^th issue of The Triangle had a very interesting article on using Wikipedia for researching academic papers. For the most part, the article stated that using Wikipedia as a reference for a college or graduate school level paper was probably not such a good idea.

But if you can’t use Wikipedia, what should you use instead?

The Drexel University Libraries offers over 300 electronic resources for you to try, with nearly 50 databases specializing in business information. Unless you are planning to work at a university, this is probably the most information rich you will ever be. Please take advantage of these electronic resources, which are available to you for free while you are student.

Of course, our databases may not be as quite as user-friendly as Wikipedia, and are not likely to pop up in a Google search. To help you, librarians are standing by, on call, seven days a week, ready to answer your questions and to point you to quality resources that will make research easier and more gratifying.

Wikipedia can be the first place you go for information, but especially in a university setting, please make sure it’s not the last place.

*****

“Wikipedia use open to debate”
By Sravanthi Dama
The Triangle
April 27^th, 2007

* Originally published on May 8, 2007. For business research tips & tricks in real-time, subscribe to LIB-BIZ-KIT.

Let’s see a show of hands of students looking for a job or a co-op or career advice. Anyone?

The Drexel University Libraries has brand-new resource specifically for job-seekers. It’s easy to get caught up in all this fascinating job-hunting and career information available through this rich resource including:

- Industry career guides
- Industry employer guides
- Career topic guides
- A day in the life of a…
- Company Q & A with actual employees
- Sample cover letters and resumes
- Careers of celebrities
- Message boards
- and more!

To find the Vault Online Career Library

1. Go to www.library.drexel.edu
2. Click on “Databases/Articles”
3. Browse databases by title

* Originally published on May 23, 2007. For business research tips & tricks in real-time, subscribe to LIB-BIZ-KIT.

Factiva is a fantastic new database providing articles from nearly 9,000 sources, from 152 countries, and in 22 languages. It is an essential business resource and you should start using it pronto!

You can use the “Search” page to use a combination of keywords and cascading menus to search by source, company, subject, industry, region, or language.

Quickly browse today’s top news from newspapers and magazines in the “News” tab. A pull-down menu on the upper left side allows you to change newspaper groups by region and by topic, including “top business news.”

Finally, take some time to explore the “companies/markets” tab, which offers several interesting features. For example, if you want to know what made a stock soar or plummet on a particular day, click on the stock pricing chart to enlarge it. Click on any day on the chart and you will be taken to articles about that company on that day.

Factiva tips

1. Only 11 people can use Factiva at one time. So, if you can’t log in, try again in a few minutes.

2. Factiva will log you off after about 3 minutes of inactive time. So, in the time it takes to make some tea, answer the phone, or put on a sweater, you’ll be logged off.

3. Interested in the future look of Factiva? Get a sneak preview by click on “Factiva Search 2.0.”

* Originally published on May 5, 2006. For business research tips & tricks in real-time, subscribe to LIB-BIZ-KIT.

Research Guides are absolutely invaluable.

Sometimes the hardest part of doing research is trying to figure out which resource to use. Research guides will save you time and frustration by suggesting databases and books to use to find the information you need.

Created by myself and my reference librarian colleagues here at the Drexel University Libraries, subject guides filled with resources and advice for researching specific topics. They stealthily lead you to the best resources for each topic. For example, if you are trying to find market research reports, you can consult the Marketing subject guide to find a section on market research surveys. You will also get a quick mini-lesson on how to use each resource.

Research guides can be found right off the Library Website. Just click on “Business” in the green box and you’re there!

* Originally published on April 21, 2005. For business research tips & tricks in real-time, subscribe to LIB-BIZ-KIT.

I’d like to introduce you to Mergent Online, a new database from the Drexel University Libraries. Mergent Online is an excellent resource to choose when looking for company or industry information. Like nearly all of our electronic resources, you may use Mergent Online from off campus.

Here are just a few ways to use Mergent Online:

1) Try a basic search for company details. You’ll find a synopsis, history, executive information, business descriptions, and more.
2) Click on Industry Reports to look at reports on a variety of industries. Mergent offers North American, Asia Pacific, and European industry reports.
3) The Annual Reports tab renders full-color annual reports put out by companies to their investors – current and historical.
4) You can also use the EDGAR search to look at SEC filings, all searchable by keyword.

* Originally published on February 2, 2006. For business research tips & tricks in real-time, subscribe to LIB-BIZ-KIT.

Finding statistics such as market share, demographics, or production statistics can be a real drag. There’s nothing more frustrating that sifting through thousands of articles, trying to find what types of food people eat before they go to bed, or the market share of steakhouse chain restaurants, or what automotive features are most important to mothers.

For these types of questions, I recommend Tablebase, a really useful database that provides tabular information pulled from a variety of trade publications.

How to find Tablebase

1) Start at www.library.drexel.edu
2) Click on “Databases/Articles”
3) You can use the “Browse Databases by Title” list to find Tablebase
4) If you’re off campus, you’ll be prompted to log in using your Drexel email username and password

Tablebase Tips

- Don’t be alarmed by the complicated search screen. You can use the keyword search at the top, or the variety of the pull-down menus. I find a combination of one or two keywords and the “concept term” menu works well for me.

- Once you get your results list, you can look at the tables, or if you’d like see the article from which the table was pulled, click on the document icon on the far right side of the screen.

- If you enjoy using Tablebase’s extensive search options, you may also want to try its sister database Business & Industry which provides articles instead of tables.

* Originally published on November 15, 2006. For business research tips & tricks in real-time, subscribe to LIB-BIZ-KIT.

There’s been a lot of confusion about finding full text for Harvard Business Review articles and Harvard Business School Cases.

Let’s start with the Harvard Business Review

If you are looking specifically for articles from the Harvard Business Review, you can do a Journal Titles Search for Harvard Business Review

1. Use the big blue search box on the Drexel University Libraries Website. Search for Harvard Business Review, switching the pulldown menu from “catalog” to “journals”
2. Click on “Click for Resource” which will pop up a page from SFX
3. On the SFX page, click on the red GO!.
   
4. Use the chronological menu to find a specific article or use the “search within this publication” link to do a keyword search only in HBR. Full-text will be found right in this database.

Easy!

OK, now on to Harvard Business School Cases

I often get questions about finding full text for Harvard Business School Cases. Sorry Charlie, Drexel doesn’t have them. Actually, no library anywhere offers access to Harvard Business School Cases. Everyone must individually pay for Harvard Business School Cases. Period.

In fact, this morning I called the Harvard Business School’s Baker Library to learn that not even Harvard Business School students get access to all Harvard Business Cases for free.

This gets a little confusing because EBSCO Business Source Premier does give citations for the cases, but there’s no way to get the full text. It’s an impossible tease.

How to tell the difference.

Harvard Business Review article citation:
Complex Aggregation Strategies. Harvard Business Review, Nov2003, Vol. 81 Issue 11, p80-80, 1p.

Harvard Business School Cases citation:
Francisco de Narvaez at Tia: Selling the Family Business. By: Hill, Linda A.; Doughty, Kristin C.. Harvard Business School Cases, Oct 01, 2000, p1, 12p.

As you can see, the differences between the two are subtle. HBR articles will have volume and issue numbers, and the cases don’t. Also each publication is very clearly specified.

* Originally published on October 18, 2005. For business research tips & tricks in real-time, subscribe to LIB-BIZ-KIT.