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Business Plan Research

This guide will provide you the tools to create a business plan.

Researching a Company or Brand

Company/Brand Profiles

  • Business Insights: Essentials (Gale):  Research and analyze companies and industries around the world. Featuring the content you need to explore a global business landscape: extensive reference content from Gale's core business collection, easy-to-use company fundamentals and investment research reports, industry rankings, profiles, market share data, company histories.
  • Business Market Research Collection (ProQuest): The Business Market Research Collection provides company, industry, and geopolitical macroeconomic market research from three sources: 
    - Hoover's Company Profiles, which offers information on 40,000 global public and non-public companies including location, summary financials, competitors, officers, and more
    - OxResearch, which features succinct articles covering significant economic and political developments of major significance from a network of over 1,000 faculty at Oxford and beyond
    - Snapshots Series, which includes market research overviews on over 40 industries and 40 countries to 2008
  • Business Source Complete: With premium full-text content and peer-reviewed business journals, this database is the essential tool for business students. It covers all disciplines of business, including marketing, management, accounting, banking, finance and more.
  • Gale Virtual Reference Library: Gale Virtual Reference Library is a database of encyclopedias and specialized reference sources for multidisciplinary research. These reference materials once were accessible only in the library, but now you can access them online from the library or remotely 24/7. Because each library creates its own eBook collection, the content you see may vary if you use the database at different libraries (your school, your public library, or your office).
  • MarketLine: Provides access to MarketLine reports which include company, industry, financial and country business data for every major marketplace in the world. Database contains: company profiles, company SWOTs, industry analysis, case studies, country profiles, country statistics and country PESTLEs.
  • Statista: Statista is an online statistics, market research and business intelligence portal. It provides access to data from market and opinion research institutions, as well as from business organizations and government institutions in English, French, German and Spanish. Statista also provides data on market forecasts, white paper studies, dossiers, industry reports, digital market outlooks and consumer market outlooks.

News Resources

  • ABI/INFORM Complete (ProQuest): The ABI/INFORM Collection is comprised of ABI/INFORM Global, ABI/INFORM Trade & Industry, and ABI/INFORM Dateline. The collection features thousands of full-text journals, dissertations, working papers, key business and economics periodicals such as The Economist and Sloan Management Review, country-and industry-focused reports, and major news sources like the Wall Street Journal. Its international coverage gives researchers a complete picture of companies and business trends around the world.
  • Stylus: Stylus provides inspirational and informative research and relates it to prevailing consumer trends, acting as a catalyst to push the design industries to new levels.
  • WGSN: WGSN defines and shapes winning style and design with proven global authority, WGSN identifies and analyses current and future trends, creating online tools that can be put into action to power their customers' commercial success. WGSN enables those who need to see, think, and act on consumers' evolving wants, needs and behaviors to create brilliant products and services.

SWOT REPORTS