Getting Down to Business

'I love the smell of capitalism in the morning.' Even if this sentiment goes unspoken when you introduce your users to any one of the business databases reviewed here, there is no denying that competition among providers has resulted in an exceptionally impressive array of enhanced bibliographic resources.

All these products offer extensive back runs of indexing and abstracting coverage and full-text (and frequently full-image) access to key trade and scholarly business journals. Features such as local holdings information, open-URL compliance, and built-in document delivery are becoming more common. Most of these products seek to distinguish themselves from their competitors by supplementing bibliographic and full-text journal information with proprietary extras such as financial data, company profiles, and country economic reports.

Whether your library's mission involves unlocking the mysteries of the corporate world for the community college business student, supporting the research of MBA faculty, or putting critical research and data into the hands of corporate leadership, there is a resource here that will satisfy even the most demanding of your users.

Content: ABI/INFORM, a leading source of international business information for more than 30 years, is considered by many to be an essential resource for colleges, universities, and business schools. With a front-end searching and display interface produced by ProQuest Information and Learning, the database remains at the top of the list for the study of business conditions and industry-specific topics worldwide.

As an incentive to reach a larger population, three editions of ABI/INFORM are available: ABI/INFORM Global, ABI/INFORM Research, and ABI/INFORM Select.

ABI/INFORM Global, the complete database, includes coverage of 1800+ primary business and management publications, including 350+ English-language titles from outside the United States, with holdings from 1971 to the present. It includes executive profiles, reports on market conditions, and in-depth case studies of global business trends, along with detailed information on 60,000+ companies. The database contains close to 1200 current sources, with 900+ full-text, page-image, or ProQuest's Text+Graphics format.

ABI/INFORM Research is similar to Global, but with less emphasis on international titles, and is well suited for undergraduate and large public libraries. It provides abstracts and citations for 700 business and management publications, including 300+ English-language titles from outside the United States.

ABI/INFORM Select, intended for smaller institutions, includes nearly 350 popular sources, with coverage beginning in 1991.

ProQuest has increased content to the ABI/INFORM database with the additions of John Wiley & Sons' BoldIdeas Collection of 40 business journals, the full text of three business journals from Palgrave Macmillan, and 125 business and economics journals from Kluwer Academic.

ProQuest offers two additional products that complement ABI/INFORM. ABI/INFORM Trade & Industry has 700+ full-text titles useful for the study and comparison of specific trades and industries (about 200 of these titles overlap in Global). ABI/INFORM Dateline, contains 140+ local and regional business publications, as well as business-oriented newswire services across the United States and Canada. All articles are available in ASCII full text.

Now available as a formal product, ABI/INFORM Complete incorporates both the Dateline and Trade & Industry resources into the Global database.

Subscribers have a new bonus on free access to the ABI/INFORM Archive, a database of back file content digitized from the microform masters in the ProQuest Digital Vault. It provides full-page images of complete runs of titles, with illustrations and advertisements. Currently 25 business journals are integrated and coverage extends from 1918 to 1986. The archive also includes ASCII text articles searchable by keyword and Boolean operators, plus table of contents access.

In addition to the ProQuest interface, ABI/INFORM is available via Dialog, OCLC FirstSearch, SilverPlatter, and Ovid Technologies.

Searchability: The ProQuest system allows institutions to integrate numerous databases within a single search interface. The default is to search all collections, although users can choose to limit to a particular resource. The navigation banner on the welcoming screen remains constant throughout the search process and offers users a text option as well as Spanish, French, and German alternatives. This text-based version for screen-reader software complies with government guidelines and standards for accessibility. The company states that this alternate interface makes ProQuest available to users with limited hand use and low or no vision.

Users can begin their research with the default search by word or phrase. Basic limiting options can be added to this search as well. As the mouse passes over each selection, tips are available to assist users with the choices.

In addition to the default, search methods include Guided, which offers Search Fields, Boolean Operators, and Date Restrictors via pull-down menus; Advanced; Natural Language; and Publication. These methods are clearly accessible from a tab on the navigation banner. Other tabs include Topic Finder, Browse Lists, Results & Marked List, and Search Guide. Context- sensitive help is available from every screen and includes a glossary of terms and a Content and Index link. The system also provides links to a series of Quick Print Guides and ProQuest's Training Resource Center, which presents a multitude of information for users as well as trainers.

We started with a basic search for portfolio management. Users must select Show total number of articles limit in order to identify how many articles are retrieved in a given search (a little quirky). We limited to peer-reviewed publications only. By refining our initial query, we retrieved 778 articles. Individual results include the citation, search fields (some of which are hyperlinked), the abstract, and full text if available.

For searchers who prefer to review topics, there is Browse List, an alphabetical directory of terms indexed in the database. The Topic Finder displays a hierarchy or tree of related subjects. These subjects are based on terms found in the ProQuest Thesaurus, and users can choose to narrow or broaden by subject and view articles preselected by the system.

The Advanced Search provides more experienced searchers with access to reference tables containing information about search syntax, search fields, date ranges, operators, classification codes, and other advanced search features. We performed an advanced search with Classification Codes. These codes are unique to ProQuest and are an efficient means to hone in on a specific topic or industry. We selected 9521 Minority- & women-owned businesses. Entering cc(9521) and franchis?, then limiting to Periodicals in the Publication type, retrieved 69 articles. Refining to full-text only produced 11 documents.

Another excellent feature is Results and Marked Lists. This permits the user to monitor any marked lists, the last search run, and recent searches. This screen also lets users create a Durable Link to the search results, so they can link back to it later.

Price: Subscription prices to ABI/Inform are based on FTE, population served, and particular database package. Consortial pricing and discounts for multiple ProQuest products are available, so contact the sales representative for specifics. A free 30-day trial is available to public, school, and academic libraries.

Who Needs It?: ABI/Inform is highly recommended for all large public and academic libraries. By offering the product in several configurations, ProQuest appears committed to making the database affordable. The product is of value to novice and experienced users alike. ProQuest's goal of expanding coverage with scholarly titles appears to be on track, and the improvements to the interface are extensive and ongoing. In addition to onsite training, a new series of one-hour web training sessions for faculty and staff is available with audio access. We 'attended' an informative new user session (an advanced class is also offered) that allowed for questions and discussion of techniques with both the trainer and with the other ABI/INFORM users.

Content: Business & Company Resource Center integrates worldwide coverage for company profiles, industry profiles, and 3650 business periodicals, of which 2600 are available in full text. Company profiles are offered for U.S. and international public and private companies. The database details 4600+ worldwide company histories and chronologies, which are updated annually; investment reports; financials; rankings; suits and claims; and product and industry reviews. It also offers valuable access to business journal news and analysis, consumer marketing data, emerging technology reports, and 20-minute delayed stock quotes.

Additionally, the database includes accurate and up-to-date company and industry intelligence for 300,000+ companies; business sections from 100 newspapers; Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News Service; Financial Times; and indexing and abstracting from the Wall Street Journal, Asian Wall Street Journal, and New York Times. Updated daily, coverage extends from 1977 to the present, with full text beginning in 1985.

Business & Company Resource Center is fully customizable with a choice of specialty modules, including PROMT, Investext Plus (formerly Research Bank Web), and Newsletters ASAP. PROMT, Predicast's Overview of Markets and Technology, is an excellent resource for students seeking in-depth information about market size and share, industry trends, emerging technologies, and competitive opportunities. Investext Plus is an investment and financial analysis database covering global companies and industries. Research from more than 500 investment banks and 190 trade associations are included. Investext Plus includes fundamental company information on 10,000 publicly held U.S. companies from Moody's Investors Services.

New in 2002 to Business & Company Resource Center is First Call Consensus Snapshot from Thomson Financial; industry overviews from Gale's Encyclopedia of American Industries, Encyclopedia of Emerging Industries, and Encyclopedia of Global Industries; and market share information from Gale's Market Share Reporter and World Market Share Reporter.

Global coverage has increased this past year in part from licensing agreements with Business Monitor International and Economist Intelligence Unit.

Searchability: Gale has compiled an impressive array of business-related material and is about to release a new interface that is meant to improve searching capabilities and functionality of the database. It is evident from the quality of resources, as well as newly acquired content, that this product has received significant effort. Numerous features have already been incorporated, but basics like Quick Start Search and Advanced Search have not been implemented at the time of review. The upgrade to 2.0 should be in place in early 2003.

Users can currently perform searches such as Company Name or Ticker Symbol, SIC or NAICS code, Subjects in Article, Geographic Search, and Personal Name. Additionally, although the Journal Name search is mainly a limiter field, users can enter a journal name as a query. Other limiting fields include Full-text and Peer Reviewed publications, Date Range, and Content Area.

Unsure of the correct spelling of a private company in Colorado, we started a Company Name search by selecting the Browse Companies hyperlink. (There are Browse SIC/NAICS Codes and Browse Journals option as well.) An alphabetical listing is displayed. A better way to perform this search is to use truncation. We revised our search with Rainbo! (! stands for one character). This query resulted in 133 records, and the desired company was listed on the first page. The company information was quite brief, but the hyperlink SIC/NAICS codes let us create a comparison of similar companies in another geographic region. Additionally, this revised search produced results for companies in the particular SIC, ranked by revenue; an Industry Overview; and contact information on associations within the company's industry.

An added feature of Business & Company Resource Center is InfoMarks. This icon at the top of a page indicates that the URL of the page can be bookmarked for future reference after the search session has ended. Users can link to a particular article, or save and resubmit searches. This is useful for librarians or trainers creating bibliographies, research guides, and reading lists.

Price: Subscription prices to Business & Company Resource Center are based on FTE, population served, and particular database package. Options include simultaneous users, unlimited, and remote access. Consortial pricing and discounts are available, so contact a sales representative for specifics. A free 30-day trial is available.

Who Needs It?: With Business & Company Resource Center, Gale has created wide-ranging content suited for researchers seeking detailed company and industry news and information. Material is up-to-date, especially if the database includes the Investext Plus module (we retrieved a number of Investment Reports posted the day of our search). Searching and navigation work well. Although the interface is in the process of an upgrade, we were able to successfully perform a wide variety of searches. On the other hand, there were a few discrepancies. The search history function was unclear: sometimes our searches were listed, other times they weren't. But the pros certainly outweigh the cons, especially with new features and enhanced functionality on their way. Recommended for public libraries serving business and industry researchers, as well as those institutions supporting the finance, economics, management, or marketing curricula at the undergraduate and graduate level.

Content: EBSCO Publishing had business schools and libraries in mind when it developed Business Source Premier, with its emphasis on research-oriented and scholarly business literature. Of the 3350 titles from 1965 to the present, over 80 percent are available in full text, and of these 911 are peer-reviewed.

All aspects of business fall within Business Source Premier's scope, as does management, finance, accounting, international business, and economics. Popular titles--BusinessWeek, Fortune--are in full text, along with weightier academic publications. For a handful of titles, retrospective coverage (with accompanying PDF files) goes back decades.

Supplementing Business Source Premier with local business coverage is Regional Business News, which provides full-text access to 75 business journals, newspapers, and newswires from across the U.S. Both Business Source Premier and Regional Business News are updated daily.

Searchability: When searchers connect to EBSCOhost Web, they see a list of their library's EBSCO subscriptions. Searchers may select a single database or multiple ones.

Business Source Premier comes up in Advanced Search mode with searching by Keyword in the Default Fields (Article Title, Article Subject Headings, Author, and Abstract) as the primary option. An extensive listing of Limiters and Expanders resides below the main search template. Limiting options include full text (and full text with images), peer-reviewed journals, date ranges, cover story, publication type, and articles that deal with several companies, industries, people, or products. Here the user may further refine a search by typing in a Magazine title, Product Name, NAICS/Industry Code, Company/Entity name, Duns Number, or Ticker Symbol. Checking one of the Expanders enables searching within the full text of articles and searching for related words (i.e., synonyms and plurals of your search terms).

When a searcher uses these limiters, a flag appears at the top of the results list that is a reminder that there are limits on the search. It's a nice touch. The results list puts additional useful information on display: a local holdings statement and icons indicating if full text is available and in what formats. All Results display by default, but the searcher may click on Scholarly Journals, Magazines, or Country Economic Reports to refine a search after the fact. Results are arranged chronologically with no relevancy ranking capability.

Subject searches in Advanced mode allow the user to view controlled vocabulary terms in alphabetical or relevancy ranked order.

Reports in the Company Profiles component of the database are about 200 words. This would seem a pretty pedestrian addition until you notice the link to a PDF version of the complete report. Clicking here downloads extensive up-to-date research reports from Datamonitor. While the obvious approach to searching is by company name, we entered keywords and NAICS Code numbers with Relevancy Ranked browsing selected and got excellent results.

Search histories may be retrieved for reexecution, and EBSCO databases use permanent links so they may be bookmarked or incorporated into web-based bibliographies and reading lists.

Price: Contact EBSCO Publishing for pricing information. Librarians and faculty may request a free trial.

Who Needs It?: EBSCO targets the business school and library market with these products, but we're convinced that Business Source Premier's appeal should extend well beyond those boundaries. Economics students (through the graduate level) and faculty are an obvious audience as are political scientists. Given the extensive retrospective coverage, for a handful of titles at least, the database offers historians a wealth of primary source material. Outside academe, the business community, investors, consumers, and consumer advocates would all get considerable mileage out of Business Source Premier.

Content: RDS Business Reference Suite is a collection of three highly complementary business information databases, originally produced by Responsive Database Services (now part of the Gale Group family). Business & Industry, Business & Management Practices, and TableBase are particularly strong for company and industry analysis. In combination, they form a powerful resource that provides access to company and industry news, management practices, and market research information. Since they are three distinct products, institutions may elect to purchase each separately. The Business Reference Suite contains 1400+ business sources, 60 percent of which are full text and nearly half are international in scope.

Business & Industry is a broad-based business information database with nitty-gritty facts and figures about companies, industries, products, and markets. It covers all industries and is international in scope. Content is drawn from over 1000 publications. Holdings range from 1995 to the present. Business & Management Practices (BaMP) provides real-life applications, case studies, and explicit how-to guidelines on concepts such as absenteeism and diversification. Coverage includes 300+ professional and trade journals with information relevant to the fields of management, planning, production, finance, marketing, information technology, and human resources.

TableBase is a database comprised of tabular information. Each table is given a 'title' (text) that's created by the staff and is searchable within the system. Many of the records have textual content that supports the data in the tables. The tables provide information such as market share, production, imports, exports, sales, and much more. Gale indexes the contents of the table, rather than the accompanying text, resulting in exceptionally accurate retrieval results when requiring charts, graphs, spreadsheets, etc.

Searchability: Using an interface that can search across the board allows students to retrieve not only articles related to their query but also current statistics, illustrations, and tabular data.

The welcoming screen is simple and uncluttered. The interface is refreshingly text based, with a series of search boxes and pull-down menus displaying controlled vocabulary index terms for Concept Terms, Industry Names, Document Types, or Geographic Region. All searches performed for this review included the entire suite.

There are numerous search options, ranging from the basic word or phrase, words in title, to the more advanced method that employs a combination of Concept Terms (terms that define the events or facts discussed in articles) and command searching.

We started by entering consumer behavior with apparel as the Industry. The results screen displays the terms entered, with a table listing the number of articles found within each distinct database. Users select the View Articles button to display the Search results screen. We retrieved 416 articles from Business & Industry, 91 from Business & Management Practices, and 46 tables from TableBase. From our results list, which is also in table format, we were able to select records, discovering a market research report suggesting that the inhabitants of Hong Kong are the most fashion-conscious people in the world.

We decided to focus our search by adding the Concept Term Baby Boomer market (the text boxes allow users to select more than one entry). Our results dropped to 16 articles and two tables, which satisfied our interest.

The next search was for company information. There is no Browse index, only for SIC codes and publications, so users must have a particular company in mind. We entered Conseco and selected Company Overview as the Document Type. Results can be limited to only articles that include tabular data. Thirteen records matched our search. We would like to see Gale add a Search History feature, as some of the queries get quite complex when multiselecting index terms and limiting.

Speaking of limiting, we did a word search for airline adding Travel & leisure as the Industry. Citations to thousands of newspaper articles were displayed on the initial results screen, as well as journal articles and tables. When we tried to limit to newspapers as Document Type, we received a very small subset, which lacked articles that we should have received.

Price: Subscription prices to RDS Business Reference Suite are based on FTE, population served, and particular database package. Institutions can purchase any combination of databases or the suite itself. Options include simultaneous users, unlimited, and remote access. Consortial pricing and discounts are available, so contact the sales representative for specifics. A free 30-day trial is available to public, school, and academic libraries.

Who Needs It?: The RDS Business Reference Suite should appeal to a wide range of users who require in-depth company and market research data. The no-nonsense interface and the ease with which a basic as well as more sophisticated search can be executed will please novice and seasoned researchers alike. The Suite is a nearly ideal resource for student researchers (undergraduate and graduate), faculty, and the general public interested in international business issues.

Content: Wilson Business Full Text traces its roots back nearly a half century to Business Periodicals Index. The newly redesigned WilsonWeb version of the resource provides indexing and abstracting coverage, beginning in 1982, to some 600 business magazines, trade journals, annual reports, and scholarly journals, along with such newspapers as the Wall Street Journal and the business section of the New York Times. The full range of business activity falls within the scope of Wilson Business Full Text, and economics and management are a focus as well.

Full-text coverage--with access to more than 350 titles--begins in 1995, and the newly implemented SFX-based WilsonLink feature lets searchers link to additional full-text titles in any non-Wilson, open-URL-compliant resource to which the library may subscribe. A Library Holdings feature helps direct researchers to the library's print collection. A document delivery feature is also included. Content is updated daily.

Searchability: This review was conducted on a preview version of the new WilsonWeb interface. This dramatic upgrade--which introduces an impressive array of new features, including full-text and natural-language searching along with a database-specific thesaurus--was released in December 2002.

While WilsonWeb offers a Basic Search mode and Browsing, on login the product opens in Advanced Search mode, which is useful for even a modestly sophisticated user. Researchers can then search one or more databases--if the library has multiple WilsonWeb subscriptions. By checking the Business Full Text box, several limiting options are added to the search template and sorting options.

The new WilsonWeb should brighten the outlook of any professional searcher bemoaning the dumbing-down of search options. No fewer than 30 operators are available. These include Concept Operators, which couple the ability to combine search terms with the ability to turn relevancy on and off; standard Proximity Operators; Relational Operators, which conduct string searches as well as date and numerical comparisons; Evidence Operators, which perform 'intelligent' word searches on homonyms, stems, approximate matches, and wildcards; and Score Operators, which allow the searcher to manipulate the factors that calculate the relevancy ranking. The new Natural Language search feature has its own set of operators, which allow the searcher to request records similar to ones already found. Finally, searchers may incorporate Modifiers like case sensitivity and word order to refine a search strategy further. In other words, if you can't tailor a search to your precise specifications, it's not Wilson's fault.

We tested the new thesaurus with a search for socially responsible investing. Although that phrase did not turn up as a subject term, the thesaurus was sophisticated enough to suggest a very useful list of alternative (and valid) subject terms that did work. Each of these, in turn, opened up an elegant display of related terms and subject terms with subheadings.

Returning to Advanced Search, we reformulated the search as a natural-language query (how do returns of socially responsible mutual funds compare to those without social screens?) to test the Verity Search Engine. The search produced just ten hits, with relevancy rankings ranging from 65 percent to 63 percent (which demonstrates the difference between natural-language searching and artificial intelligence--the search found what we asked it to find, but not what we meant to ask it to find). Results, in the new WilsonWeb, are relevancy ranked by default but may also be sorted by date or custom sorted.

Even when the database doesn't deliver full text, the user still has options, thanks to the new WilsonLink feature. Click on the WebLink icon and the system identifies additional databases where the article is available in full text, although retrieval is dependent upon the library's subscribing to that database. This SFX-powered feature also presents a number of document delivery options, suggests conducting an ERIC search, and opens up an Internet search engine feature so that researchers can try their luck there. WilsonLink is obviously a potentially powerful extension of the basic Wilson Business Full Text resource. However, identifying online databases that your users may not access can be a source of frustration to researchers, and sending students out of a subscription database and into the web can be a source of frustration to librarians. The feature can be turned off.

Price: Potential subscribers should consult the company for specific pricing information, but for comparative purposes, a site license for a library the size of Union College's (with a campus population of approximately 2300 FTE) would run approximately $3470. The SFX technology is offered at no extra charge. A free 30-day trial of the database is available.

Who Needs It?: Wilson Business Full Text incorporates an extensive collection of full-text material with library holdings information--making the gap between research and results almost disappear. Add in the full range of SFX-powered connections to external databases, Internet search engines, and fee-based document delivery services, and Wilson Business Full Text should be able to satisfy the research needs of everyone, from the community college business major to the demanding clients of a corporate library.