Gale's recent introduction of Business & Company Resource Center 2.0 and EBSCO's enhancements to Business Source Premier, Business Source Elite, Business Source Corporate, and Corporate ResourceNet provide more choices for business research.
If you're an information professional doing online business and company research for other people, you probably rely on Dialog, Factiva, LexisNexis, and a myriad of Internet resources, both visible and invisible. You may prefer one over another and you undoubtedly realize their relative strengths and weaknesses. You know that the full text of The Wall Street Journal is exclusive to Factiva (although it's soon to appear on ProQuest) and that only LexisNexis has the full New York Times backfile. You understand the power of Dialog's statistical RANK command. You are proficient with multiple Web search engines and have bookmarks for particularly information-rich invisible Web sites.
If, on the other hand, you're a university student using an academic library, a marketing manager sitting at your desk preparing to do research using resources on your company's intranet, or a small businessperson walking into the local public library, your choices for research are quite different. You're not an information sophisticate. You think that dialog means having a discussion, that factiva might be an automobile, and that nexis is a shampoo. You've also never heard of Gale Group, ProQuest, or EBSCO, yet it's likely that you'll use databases from those companies to perform your business research. Since it's librarians in these institutions who are going to explain what's available, it would be wise for both professionals and research novices to understand all options.
Gale's recent introduction of Business & Company Resource Center 2.0 and EBSCO's enhancements to Business Source Premier, Business Source Elite, Business Source Corporate, and Corporate ResourceNet provide more choices for business research. These products also provide more opportunities for information professionals to educate users of business information and more points of befuddlement regarding what products to purchase.
EXPANDING CONTENT
Gale's Business & Company Resource Center, first launched in 2000, is constructed much as its other Resource Centers, such as Health & Wellness, Literature, Biography, and History, by aggregating many information sources into one integrated product. The Resource Centers are the latest incarnation of Gale's Infotrac product line, first initiated a couple of decades ago by Information Access Company before its acquisition by Gale. The content in Business & Company Resource Center has expanded beyond journal titles to include Market Share Reporter, World Market Share Reporter, First Call Earnings Estimates Snapshot, Encyclopedia of American Industries, and Encyclopedia of Emerging Industries. These join existing sources such as Investext, PROMT, Gale Newsletter Database, and Trade & Industry.
If you go to the Gale Web site [www.gale.com] and click on Title Lists, you'll find that Gale claims 4,008 titles, 3,235 of which are full text. This, however, does not include the 22 reference titles included in Business & Company Resource Center. Those are listed separately. The 4,008 titles are predominantly journals and newsletters, with some news wires thrown in. The most bizarre title is You Can't Fire Me, I'm Your Father. This is a book written by Knight Kiplinger, the third generation of Kiplingers to run the financial industry publishing company.
If Gale wanted to win the numbers game, it wouldn't have listed Knight Ridder/Tribune Business Newspapers as a single title. If you break out each individual newspaper title, you'd add at least 70 more names to the journal list. Perhaps Gale decided against taking this tack because the content from these newspapers is selective: It's not the entire paper, only the business-related stories.
SEARCHING BUSINESS & COMPANY RESOURCE CENTER
The interface is well designed, although a few points are misleading. The 10 tabs at the top of a results screen--company profile, news/magazines, histories, investment reports, financials, rankings, suits and claims, products, industry overviews, and associations--imply that data exists for each of them. However, some tabs are almost always grayed out, showing that there is no data. The one most often grayed out is Suits and Claims. Even searching for Enron found nothing for Suits and Claims, much to my astonishment.
You can enter a search in several different ways--from a search box, a pull-down menu, or a tab. From initial search results, you can quickly navigate to other content areas. The system automatically runs the previous search statement against the newly selected information type. Sophisticated searching is possible, including proximity, full Boolean, nesting, three varieties of truncation, and the ability to force stop words if the phrase is enclosed in double quotation marks. The advanced search screen spells out the various fields: full text, subject, title, date, journal name, author, SIC code, NAICS code, industry description, and abstract. One interesting filter provided by Business & Company Resource Center is limiting to peer-reviewed journals.
What sets Business & Company Resource Center apart is the extraordinary variety of information sources, drawn from a mix of Gale imprints and other Thomson properties. Search on a company and your results will give you details of its current status, articles from journals, newsletters, the trade press, newspapers, its corporate history (if there is one; this is generally only available for public companies), investment reports (again this is for traded companies only), financial reports, a variety of business rankings, legal actions it's involved in (not a well-populated field), its products and brand names. Company profiles contain contact information, business description, names of top management, SIC and NAICS codes, sales figures, number of employees, year founded, fiscal year end, stock exchange, ticker symbol, and URL. Obviously, some of those fields would not be filled in if the company in question is private.
Working from the industry codes assigned to the company, Gale identifies industry information and which trade associations are applicable. The latter is particularly important for further research, since a phone call to a trade association often elicits valuable, unpublished data. To the left of each company profile is a list of subjects that are addressed by articles about the company. These are incredibly broad--management, people, sales and marketing, and strategy and planning are examples. Full-text articles conceal the subject descriptor terms that other online services make obvious.
There are a few data quality issues. When Belkin Components changed its name last year to Belkin Corporation, Business & Company Resource Center didn't recognize that it was merely a name change, not a separate company. The two records show the same address, phone numbers, and corporate officers. However, the SIC and NAICS codes are different, as are the numbers for annual sales and employees. There should be some mechanism to kick out records like this for scrutiny before they are blindly added to the database.
EXPANDING VOCABULARY
Each of EBSCO's business databases [www.epnet.com] combine full-text articles with entries that have only an abstract and indexing terms. The smallest is Business Source Elite, with 1,756 titles, of which 1,105 are full text. Next comes Corporate ResourceNet, with 1,893 titles, of which 1,340 are full text. Business Source Premier has 3,747 titles, of which 2,966 are full text, and Business Source Corporate has 3,743 titles, of which 3,346 are full text. The enhancement to all four databases is a new Business Thesaurus, announced in February 2003 but actually implemented some 6 months earlier. The thesaurus was developed by ontology experts who consulted with an advisory board of business librarians and lexicographers. Interestingly, EBSCO intends its thesaurus to define the business world in general; it's not based on the content of the EBSCO business databases. The thesaurus replaces the previous subject authority file.
The full thesaurus can be viewed online by clicking on the Thesaurus box. If your administrator has set up EBSCO databases so that several run concurrently, you may not see that box. In Utah, for example, the State Library's Pioneer service combines Business Source Premier with Regional Business News. Go to Choose Databases, select whichever of the four business databases you're subscribing to, and the Thesaurus button should appear. You can browse the terms, in alphabetical order or relevance ranked, and see broader and related terms. Browsing for the term Recall, for example, confirmed that the term is in use, but it also made some distinctions. For recall of employees, EBSCO says, "Use: Layoff systems" and for recall of products, "Use: Product recall." In actuality, if you run the search simply using the Recall term, you'll retrieve articles about product recall. Interestingly, you'll also retrieve some about brand recognition--how well people recall, as in remember, a brand.
Displaying the full text of articles (some are available as PDF documents) reveals the complete indexing used to identify the subject components of the article. These can be quite extensive. The article "Does It Make Sense to Use Scents to Enhance Brand Memory?" was indexed by Brand identification, Recognition (Psychology), and Marketing Research, as well as Recall. In addition to the thesaurus terms, records can be assigned Other terms. In the case of the scents article, the other term was Scent as a Marketing Device, which has to be one of the more specific terms I've ever seen. Click on any of the descriptor terms and EBSCO runs a search on that term. On the other hand, there are records in the database that have no descriptor terms from the thesaurus assigned to them. I have yet to find a Xinhua news wire item with indexing.
As with Gale's Business & Company Resource Center, the EBSCO search template is well designed to point out the searchable fields. These include date, number of pages, cover story, product name, NAICS industry code, articles with images, company/entity, Duns number, ticker symbol, publication type (periodical, newspaper, books), and articles on several companies, industries, people, or products. Like Business & Company Resource Center, you can limit your search to scholarly (peer-reviewed) journals. The fact that both feature this reinforces their target markets as the academic community. Both are also sold to public and government libraries.
There are some data quality issues with EBSCO, as well. It's always easy to second guess the indexers; it's harder to be the indexer. It can get down to mere personal quibbling. Still, I was surprised that a Fortune article on American Skiing, a formerly public company that has fallen on hard times, used Business losses, Going public (securities), and Stocks as its three thesaurus terms. Somehow I would have thought the concept of skiing, or at least resorts, should have been included. I did appreciate that the article was also coded by Duns number and ticker symbol. The NAICS code, however, was 52321 (Securities and Commodity Exchanges). Again, I would have added a code indicating what the company does, not just its troubled financial situation.
I'm not sure how EBSCO comes up with names to put into its People field. An interview I did with Google's Craig Silverstein ("Google Views the Present, Future," In formation Today, January 2002) did not put his name into a people field. It did put Google into the Company/Entity field and assigned six highly relevant thesaurus terms to the article. Another (very brief) article I wrote for the same publication gave equal words to presentations by Mary Ellen Bates and Anne Mintz at the 2002 Internet Librarian conference. Only Mary Ellen's name showed up in the People field. I queried EBSCO about these quality issues, but did not receive an answer.
EBSCO's business databases are weighted heavily towards articles, although including company profiles from Data Monitor and information from some annual publications. The interest in indexing and thesauri should gladden the hearts of information professionals, although I suspect more naive searchers will ignore the possibilities. Even when searches are restricted to journal articles, results are rarely a complete overlap, since each producer includes a different set of source materials. Searches also return different results because the search mechanisms include or exclude thesaurus terms. The enhancements Gale and EBSCO have introduced are very welcome and indicate some very real differences in scope and mission. Which to choose depends upon nuances in types of questions asked by users. You need to consider types of content, important content sources, and search functionality when advising on acquisition and helping with search strategies.
Marydee Ojala [marydee@xmission.com] is the editor of ONLINE.
Comments? E-mail letters to the editor to marydee@Jxmission.com.
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