Factiva and ThomsonONE Banker (access restricted to current Columbia affiliates) are two central sources for doing background research on public companies and on executives. For more business research resources, visit the Business & Economics Library website.

Of particular importance on the site: the 24/7 Help feature is a searchable knowledgebase that guides you through databases and other resources, and the Guides link takes you to research guides on various topics.

ThomsonONE Banker

ThomsonONE Banker is a comprehensive database of company information (as well as data on indices, portfolios, stock markets, and deals). Its interface is quite user-friend for company searches. For more in-depth SEC filings and PDFs of company annual reports, see the companion database, Thomson Research (access restricted to current Columbia affiliates).

Getting the Most out of Factiva

Factiva, a joint product of Dow Jones and Reuters, is a source for the full text of thousands of news sources, including newspapers, wires, broadcast transcripts, and trade publications. It also contains a significant amount of company information, including stock prices, balance sheet information, and lists of competitors within the same sector.

When searching the News portion of Factiva, two types of searching can help to filter your results down to the most useful sources:

Proximity searching:
A proximity search puts search terms within a certain distance of each other in the story, and replaces “AND” as the connector between terms. Some examples:
gates same tuberculosis
(this will find the name Gates in the same paragraph as tuberculosis)
unisys w/10 homeland security
(this will find unisys within 10 words of the phrase homeland security – you can change the number of words to anything between 1 and 10)

Atleast searching:
An atleast search specifies a minimum number of occurrences of a word in a story (to a maximum of 50). It is particularly helpful for finding more in-depth stories, or transcripts of a broadcast on which a particular person was a guest. Example:
robert w/2 chen and atleast8 rae
(this will find Robert within two words of Chen, and at least 8 occurrences of RAE).