BUS 320: Library Guide

1.  Introduction

This course guide has been designed as a starting point for the research you will need to do to complete your Business 320 research assignment.  It lists the main SFU Library research guides that you will need to consult to find the most relevant resources.  It also covers the most common problems that you are likely to encounter.

The range of potential resources for your assignment is quite broad, so the list of potential resources is too large for one guide.  Start with the tools/tips listed here, but remember to ask for help if you have trouble finding what you need.
 

 2.  Background information

One part of your assignment involves researching the company and its industry so that you have an idea of the environment in which the company operates. The following are just a few of the resources that may assist you.

a. Start with the company site for items such as company press releases and financial statements. Other sites that you could try for press releases are PRNewsWire, Marketwire and Canada NewsWire. Remember that you are only getting the company's point of view from such publications. You will also need to look for independent news and analysis from some of the sources below.

b. For both press releases and more independent articles, try the indexes listed below.

• Canadian Newsstand
  Fulltext articles and transcripts from many Canadian newspapers and news shows from the late 1980s up to a day or two ago.
• Business Source Complete
  Canadian and US articles in academic and popular publications. Try searching for your company in the Company Name field. Also click on Company Profiles on the right side of the search screen to see if there is a Datamonitor profile of your company.
• PressDisplay
  Recent issues of newspapers from around the world, including the Wall Street Journal Asia and the Wall Street Journal Europe. 
• Wall Street Journal
  Recent (1984-present) articles

c. For additional company-level information check out the following guides:

• Annual reports
• Company Information

d. To find a profile of the industry, start with the suggestions in the Library guide to Industry Surveys, especially the search tips in section 2.d.

KEY SOURCE: NetAdvantage: Standard & Poor's industry surveys and more
50+ North American industry surveys and 10+ global surveys, each of which covers industry trends, key companies, and guidance on how to analyze a company in that industry. 

 3.  Financial data

As I mentioned above, the first source for financial data on a company is the company's web site. Look for a link to "Investors" or "About the Company" for online versions of their annual and quarterly reports.

KEY SOURCE: The SFU Library database most likely to help with this task is MINT Global. Start with MINT, then try the resources below.

For further resources, try the following SFU Library guides:

• Ratio Analysis
  • A key source from the Ratio Analysis guide is ThomsonONE Investment Banking, but note that only 5 SFU people can be in T1-IB at a time. Try searching for your company (ticker - top left), then choose the Company View (bottom left), then Price & Fundamentals --> Comparables.
• Annual reports
• Company Information
  • A few key sources on the Company Information guide that will help you identify competitors/comparable companies: Hoovers, Datamonitor, and GlobalData. Start there, but explore some of the other sources as well.

Also see our list of databases that contain financial data.

 4.  About IFRS

• Knotia.ca via the SFU Library
  Contains the full IFRS (Standards, Exposure Drafts, and Interpretations)
   
• Books and eBooks on the IFRS
   
• Articles on IFRS
  A quick (inexhaustive) search for scholarly articles found in Business Source Complete that mention the IFRS.

5. Common problems

Problems sometimes encountered when researching this assignment include:

a. Not being able to find an industry average -- just the ratios/financials of top companies in the industry. 

Most sources don't give pre-calculated averages, just ratios and data for each of a core group of the top companies.  Even if you do find industry averages, you should always question their applicability to your case -- does your company really fit with the industry being averaged? In my experience, few such industry averages will fit the needs of the BUS 320 assignment.

b.  Not being able to find a source that places your chosen company within a perfectly suitable industry. 

For example, you can find Starbucks classed with everything from Specialty Retail to Hospitality.  In such cases, you may have to choose some comparable companies (such as Second Cup), find their financial data, and compare your company to the most important ratios of the created group.

c.  Not being able to find any comparable companies.

If you focus too much on identifying only those companies that are perfectly comparable to your target (same geography, size, product line, etc.), you may not find any at all.  Remember that this is an accounting/investing assignment, not a marketing one: You need to find comparable companies, not necessarily direct competitors. 

6.  Writing, citing, and plagiarism

6.a. Writing your report

Research is only half the battle! You also need to communicate your findings in a clear, well-structured paper, Check the SFU Library guides to Business Writing and Writing for University for resources to help with paper structures, grammar, spelling, and more.

6.b. Citing your sources

You also need to correctly cite all of the books, journal articles, and sites that you used in your research. Check with your instructor to see which citation style you are expected to use.

i. Accounting Review Style: Start by reading the Instructions for Authors, but also read some of the articles in the journal: Have have other authors cited their sources? How did they deal with financial data sources?

ii: Contemporary Accounting Research style: As with AR (above), Start by reading the Instructions for Authors (see pp. 7-9), but also read some of the articles in the journal: Have have other authors cited their sources? How did they deal with financial data sources?

iii. APA Style: If your instructor hasn't suggested a specific citation style, you may want to use the style that is most common in other areas of Business: APA Style. The resources below will help with APA citations.

APA style doesn't provide very detailed guidance on how to cite financial databases of the sort that you will likely be using. I'd suggest starting with the SFU Library guide to APA for Business Sources or the great Citing Business Sources in APA guide from McGill University.  Also try our more general guide: APA Style. Other useful guides include Citing Sources (Duke University Libraries) and the Diana Hacker site.

In some cases, you may have to resort to directly interpretating the instructions in the APA Manual (a copy is at the Ask Us Desk in the library) to try to apply them to the sources you've found.  Don't leave this to the last minute!   

Note also that some of our article indexes have information within their Help pages on how to cite articles found in databases using common formats such as APA, MLA, and Chicago, and that some of them will even allow you to save/email your citations in a specific format like APA (e.g., Business Source Complete has this feature)..

6.c. Plagiarism

Learning how to properly credit others when you use their ideas is a dfficult, but important part of research. Start with the SFU Library's interactive tutorial "Understanding and Avoiding Plagiarism" to test yourself and to learn more about plagiarism. Also read the SFU Library Guide on Plagiarism for further discussion of this critical topic and for links to other plagiarism guides.

 7.  Getting help

a. You can get help from a reference librarian in person at our reference desks as well as via email, chat, and telephone. Try our Ask a Librarian services.

b.  You may also email me: Mark Bodnar (mbodnar@sfu.ca). Please try to include as much of the following information in your question as you can.  This will make it much easier for me to help you quickly.

• What exactly you are after (saying that you need "everything about Microsoft" is far too broad - saying that you need to know where to find "comparable companies for Microsoft" is better);

• Where you have looked so far (Have you tried the sources listed in the Ratio Analysis guide? What sources in the Company Information guide have you tried?);

• and what search terms you used.