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General BusinessFile: The Library's Newest Database for Business Research on the Web

By Steven J. Bell and Michael Halperin

Take thousands of full text business journal articles complete with tables and graphics. Include descriptions of all major public and private U.S. companies. Combine with 50,000 investment analysts reports. Provide this information on the World Wide Web with hyper-links among articles, company descriptions and analysts' reports, and you will have General BusinessFile, the Library's latest web offering.

What's found in General BusinessFile

• A searchable index and abstract database of 900 publications, covering the current three-year period, with a backfile to 1982. More than half of the publications indexed are available as full text, complete with graphics.

• Profiles of over 180,000 U.S. companies, both public and private. Companies can be searched by name or identified by Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) code.

• Full text of 50,000 analyst's reports covering 11,000 companies. These reports provide in-depth analysis of public companies and industries. The reports include (but are not limited to) financial data, growth projections, strategic objectives, and market information.

Search on any of these categories (article, company profile, or analyst report) and information from the other two is just a mouse click away.

Search method one: EasyTrac

Search by subject for broad retrieval or when you're not certain how to spell a company name or product. If you enter a word or phrase with multiple meanings, EasyTrac will return a list from which you can choose the most appropriate search subject. For example, Figure 1 shows the system's response to entering the phrase "health care reform" -- a list of suggested subject terms that link to articles or related subjects.

Figure 1: An EasyTrac subject search on "health care reform".

Use keyword searching when you need more precision or when you are searching for more than one concept. Search terms can be combined with the logical operators AND, OR, and NOT. Figure 2 shows the results of a search to find articles about Medicare and how Medicare is being changed by health reform or HMOs. When constructing a search that uses both AND and OR logic, always place terms connected by OR in parentheses. Keyword searches will result in a list of articles, rather than a list of subject terms. The list of articles is called a citation list.

Figure 2: An EasyTrac keyword search on "(health reform or hmos) and (medicare)".

The citation list indicates whether an article is available in abstract or full-text format. Articles may be viewed in a fuller format by clicking the view icon, or marked for inclusion in a preferred list that is saved for later review. The citation list above (Figure 2) also shows the Limit Search icon. When the Limit Search icon is selected, the search can be modified by restricting article retrieval to full text only, or by adding a new term(s) to the search strategy.

Finding company and industry information

Figure 3: Using EasyTrac's subject guide search to find company information.

Industry information is searchable several ways. If you know the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) code, use the EasyTrac subject guide search. For example, to search for pharmaceutical preparations, enter the code as "sic 2834". This will lead to articles about the industry, a list of companies that participate in the industry (ranked by sales size), investment reports about the industry (if available), and a brief profile of the industry. As an alternative, search for industries or products by subject or keyword. For example, simply typing the word "pharmaceutical" in the subject guide search box can lead to the same group of articles and reports, though the subject list will be lengthier. A search on a specific product can be done the same way. For example, typing "anti-cancer drugs" in the search box, provides a "See" reference to the correct term, antineoplastic agents; clicking "See" yields over fifty articles and related subject terms.

Search method two: PowerTrac

To use PowerTrac, click on the PowerTrac logo from the initial General BusinessFile search screen. Figure 4 shows the PowerTrac search screen. Note that the default search is set to the keyword search field. Clicking the Choose Search Index box will show other available search indices.

Figure 4: The PowerTrac search screen.

The PowerTrac search examples shown below use field limits and set construction to find all the articles in Fortune magazine for September, 1996. Figure 5 demonstrates selection of "Journal Name" as the Search Index and "fortune" as the Search Expression.

Figure 5: Selecting intial search fields.

On the resulting screen (Figure 6), note that the results from the first search are listed in the Search Results box -- the text beginning with R1, which also indicates the number of hits found in the first search. In the next step, the results from the first search are combined with a second search. Figure 6 demonstrates adding two more field limits to the initial search results: "Date" is selected as the Search Index and "september 1996" is entered as the Search Expression. Completion of this search is shown in Figure 7, when the two searchs, R1 and R2, are combined. In PowerTrac each search result is saved as a set. Sets may be combined to bring together different search topics for precision information retrieval. Figure 8 illustrates that only articles published in Fortune magazine in September, 1996 are retrieved.

Figure 6: Results of the first search combined with selections for a second search.

Figure 7: Combination of two search results (R1 and R2) into a single set.

Figure 8: Viewing the combined search results.

The default database for PowerTrac is the article database, but searches may be restricted to other components, such as the investment reports (Investext), the backfile of older articles, company profiles, or SIC descriptions (useful for identifying SIC codes when only a subject is known).

As searchers gain experience with using PowerTrac, they will discover more sophisticated techniques to speed searches. Index searches can be entered as direct search expressions. For example, "jn=fortune" would search all articles in Fortune, while "da=september 1996" would find all articles from that date. At present, it is not possible to combine two or more expressions in the entry box. If the search requires it, use the search index to create individual results (R#) sets, which may then be combined.

Printing and downloading

• to download full-text articles or reports, have at least the first screen of the text showing
• append the filename with the .TXT extension so the downloaded file will be free of HTML coding

For more assistance