MBA Business Research: Home

Welcome to the MBA Business Research guide 

This guide contains the following sections, linked here and shown in the tabs above. 

• using the library catalog to find content - finding books
• company research - companies 
• business and industry research - industry 
• "narrative content" about a company or industry - articles 
• International company research - international 
• APA paper formatting - APA

Each lesson has a short quiz that will help you focus on the skills covered in the lesson. For instance, NAICS codes are used to codify business information. If I know a NAICS code it opens the door to a large amount of very focused data such as the number of employees in an industry and names of companies in that industry. The codes even provide a pathway to doing some unique market and marketing reports. To help develop that skill set, the quiz on business research has questions on how we find a NAICS code and how we go about choosing the right code for an industry of interest. The last tab includes a page with the answers to the quiz questions. 

In this class we will do an overview of using business data to profile a company. We will use four business resources. Here are the links to those sources but of course keep in mind that these can be found on the library Databases A to Z list along with dozens of other business resources. We are going to search for company listings in ReferenceUSA, find business and industry data in Business Insight, look for stock and ratio data in Morningstar, and finally we want to explore company narrative content as found in ABInform.  

Why are these resources important to the business researcher? We use these third party business resources because companies are careful about their corporate image as found on social media and web pages in general. Companies have staff that manage their social media accounts, responding to customer concerns but also to mitigate negative comments.

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