When researching a company or organization, it's best to consult multiple sources to create a comprehensive profile of the company, their assets, challenges, and common practices. This might include consulting the company's website, reading through their reports, reviewing news or magazine articles on company activities, finding relevant business case studies, and more.
It may also be helpful to research the industry your company operates within to better understand their environment, competitors, and common issues.
Each source can offer different but valuable information. Click on the sources below to understand what you can expect from each resource type.
Newspapers and magazines may report on the activities of a company or industry, including financial performance. For example, if there is an event that may greatly affect the performance of a company or industry, news and magazine articles may cover the event and its impact.
Professional / Trade Publications
Trade magazines publish articles aimed at people working in a particular field, to help them stay up to date on current topics within the field. Some of these articles may relate to asset management within a specific industry.
Industry reports often contain information on the activities of an industry. Use these reports to learn more about an industry, the outlook and trends within that industry, as well as information on the competitive landscape and key companies.
Company profiles offer information about a company's activities, key employees, financial history, corporate strategy, competitors and more. They can range from brief overviews of financial records to in-depth SWOT analyses. Use these reports to help you analyze company strategies and to build your recommended action plans.
Case studies provide real-life business situations and scenarios you may encounter in the workforce. These resources are often used to help develop problem solving skills. They can also be useful to give you a sense of the types of issues that companies or industries face. Search for cases on your company or the industry your company operates within in order to better understand realistic challenges and possible solutions.
Articles in scholarly journals often report the results of new research, and provide in-depth information on a very specific topic. Scholarly articles may be highly specialized, looking at very specific business practices or presenting the results of a specific research study.
Books can be a great starting point for background or overview information on a topic. Books provide overviews and introductions to topics, as well as in-depth examinations of topics. Books may focus on a specific issue within the practice of asset management, asset management within a specific industry, or a specific topic related to a company's assets.
To find these resources, you can start by searching through many databases at once using Library Search. Use the company or organization's name, as well as any additional keywords to help narrow your topic. For example, if you're interested in Apple Inc.'s financial performance, you might use the keywords 'Apple' and 'financials'. Watch the video below for a demonstration on how to brainstorm keywords and perform an effective search.
Library Search looks through many library databases, but not all of them. Content from many of the business report and statistic databases will not be included in these results. It's therefore important to also search in specific business databases to find this content. Head to the next section of this tutorial to learn which databases are recommended for this research, and how to use these databases to find the information you need.
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