Blogs

Global Markets Direct Company Profiles, a source in LexisNexis Academic, contains data and analysis on more than 8,000 companies. For about 1,000 large firms, it provides SWOT and other analysis such as:

* Business Strategy
* Financial and Operational Data
* Revenue Breakdown
* SWOT Analysis
* Value Chain Analysis

Another Rod Library database, Business Source Elite, also provides SWOT analysis for large firms in its company profiles.

Deloitte publishes Industry Outlooks for aerospace, automotive, banking, and eleven other industries. Each industry report discusses challenges and offers advice on how to deal with the recession and be well positioned for future growth.

The Art & Music Collection is now open for business on the 4th floor of Rod Library. The Collection serves as home for a diverse array of materials related to art, music, and theater including art slides, posters, prints, videocassettes, DVDs, CDs, LPs, and reference books.

Art & Music is open 85 hours per week and is staffed by a professional librarian and student assistants. The Art & Music Librarian is available to assist patrons with research needs Mondays through Fridays from 7:30 AM to 3:30 PM. Student assistants are available during all hours that the Collection is open.

For more information about the Art & Music Collection, please visit http://www.library.uni.edu/collections/art-music-collection.

Google Books is a database of several million books. In some cases the entire book can be viewed online, in other cases a snippet or limited preview, and in other cases only descriptions are available. Individual book entries link to a "Find this book in a library" service; this link indicates whether Rod Library or other nearby libraries own the book.

First, follow your professor's instructions, as some may require the "APA" style, others the "Chicago" style, and so on.

A copy of the Publication manual of the American Psychological Association is available in print at the Rod Library Reference Desk, as is a copy of the APA Style Guide to Electronic Resources. The APA style is summarized at this page.

The Chicago Manual of Style is also kept at the Rod Library Reference Desk. This quick guide from The Chicago Manual of Style Online provides tips on how to cite different types of publications.

The Library at UNC-Greensboro has done a nice summary of how to cite articles and documents from business databases like Mintel. It recommends citing Mintel reports in APA style as follows:

Mintel. (2009, December). Breakfast Foods: the Consumer - US. Retrieved from http://academic.mintel.com/.

This guide prepared by the Library at Boston University provides suggestions on how to cite sources from business databases in Chicago style.

Professors may require that all or at least some sources for assignments come from "academic" or "scholarly" journals. Both terms are used to describe such journals. So what is an academic journal?

A "journal" is a publication that is published on a regular basis such as four or twelve times a year. Academic journal articles are aimed at faculty, students, and other researchers in a field. Published academic journal articles typically have been evaluated and "graded" by two or more experts in the field before being published.

Academic journal articles typically include a list of works cited (references). The authors are named and their academic qualifications and affiliations are listed. Academic journal articles often report on an empirical study and include sections such as a literature review, description of the methodology used in the study, the results, and discussion and implication of the results.

This page goes into more detail on the characteristics of academic journals, particularly in comparison with magazines.

Rod Library databases provide ways to help identify academic or scholarly journal articles in accounting, economics, finance, management, and marketing. ABI/INFORM Global is one example; the database publisher arranges search results by publication type, including Scholarly Journals. While this method does NOT work perfectly, it does speed up the process of finding scholarly or academic journal articles on a topic.

ABI/INFORM and other business databases with this feature such as Business Source Elite and Business & Company Resource Center can be accessed from the Rod Library home page under Databases A-Z or from the Rod Library Business Portal.

Having trouble finding appropriate sources for your assignments? Or just want to speed up the research process for an upcoming paper?

Individual students and groups can request extensive assistance with a research project by scheduling a consultation with a librarian. A research consultation usually lasts 45 - 60 minutes. The librarian will suggest search terms, research tools, and strategies oriented toward a specific topic being studied by an individual or group.

Fill out the form at http://www.uni.edu/library/researchconsultation/ to request an appointment (48 hours in advance).

More immediate assistance can be obtained by contacting the Rod Library reference desk via chat, phone, email, or in person: http://www.library.uni.edu/ris/ask.shtml

The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants launched an Economic Crisis Resource Center on March 1.

"Whether you are job hunting, seeking articles on job skills in a recession or looking for financial reporting or strategic planning guidance for your business, the Economic Crisis Resource Center is designed to help all CPAs to get through this together."

This site focuses on accounting, but it also covers topics likely to be of interest to students in finance, economics, hr, and other disciplines.

Mergent Online contains up to 15 years of quarterly and annual financial data and other information for the publicly-held companies it covers. This has been limited to 10,000 U.S. companies until recently, when the publisher added coverage for more than 20,000 publicly-held firms in more than 100 different countries.

Mergent Online can be accessed from the Rod Library home page under Databases A-Z and also from the Rod Library Business Portal.

International market reports may be available in Rod Library databases and from professional association and federal government web sites. International markets for specific products may be discussed in articles as well.

About half of the reports in the Mintel database, which can be accessed from the Rod Library home page under Databases A-Z and also from the Business Portal, cover non-U.S. markets. Most of the non-U.S. reports cover specific European countries. Some reports cover international markets as a whole, though; for example, the International Hotel Industry report includes sections on China. (A personal account must be created to access this database.)

Business & Company Resource Center, also available through the Business Portal and through Databases A-Z, contains reports on products in specific countries. Go to Advanced Search, and switch the Content Area to Industry Overviews. Entering the country terms in the first box, such as China or Chinese, and the product in the second box, such as wine, in some cases retrieves overviews of the market for a given product in a specific country. You may need to change what's being searched from Keyword to Full Text. Also, watch for the green Market Research tab in the upper right side of the screen for more sources.

A Rod Library research guide for International Business & Economics gives a few more suggestions. For example, the Industries & Markets section suggests trying a U.S. government site on exports which leads to reports on doing business in other countries and sometimes on specific products in other countries.