A caveat:

When a company is private, or a subsidiary, finding information about it will take more work:  the primary information sources will be trade journal and news articles.  On this page are lists of databases to try. 

When you're also looking at international companies, you will need to use Lexis Nexis Academic (LNA), which has good coverage of international sources.  Check out the search tips:  this database is harder to use.

Expect to spend some time on this:  this type of research requires more skimming of results, and fine-tuning of your search strategy.

Some of these databases also contain more than just trade journal articles, some scholarly, some popular, even some newswires. But their strength is in their coverage of the trades.

Use these databases when you're researching specific companies or industries.

Trade journal articles usually ...

 –   are written by people who work in or specialize in a particular industry / profession, but are not scholars
 –   provide current news and information about the industry and the companies in it

Use these databases when you're researching specific companies, especially if the company is small or private. Use them also if you're researching business conditions at a local level, not regional or national.

Searching in newspaper databases is not always as easy as in other article databases: they do not usually have any subject terms, so usually you must put more thought into finding alternate search terms. I suggest starting with the BIG news article databases at the bottom of this section.

The BIG news article databases:

Lexis Nexis Academic (LNA) has some really good coverage for international news.  Unfortunately, it's harder to use than average!  But it also has some special commands (that is, unique to LNA) that can make your searching more effective.  Please read the notes below about the links, and have a look at the search tips -- they will help you!

If you have some knowledge of the foreign languages included in LNA, it may also be worth your while to look at those sources.  Remember that in some countries of the developing world, the languages of former colonial powers are still sometimes used.  Furthermore, the former colonial powers also often still cover the news in their former colonies.

Lexis Nexis Academic (LNA) offers several commands that can make your searching more productive.  (Note:  these commands only work in LNA.) Below are several that are especially helpful for searching the news.  (Please note that the atleast command works best when searching in the Everywhere field.)

• Everywhere vs. Headline & Lead fields:  the default 'Everywhere' search location is the most comprehensive, but sometimes retrieves too many articles.  Use the drop-down menu to search only in the Headline and Lead paragraph.

• atleastN( ) command:  this command tells the search engine to retrieve only articles that contain your search terms (the words you put into the parentheses) at least N times; you get to specify the number for N.  Here's an example of how to format this command:

atleast3(iphone) and apple

• length>N command: this command tells the search engine to retrieve articles that contain a minimum number of words.  Here's an example:

apple and iphone and length>1200

• ! (the exclamation point): add this wild-card character to the end of a word root, and the search engine will retrieve all variations on that root. For example:

advert! retrieves ...
  advertised, advertiser, advertising, and advertisement

• * (the asterisk): use this wild-card character when there's a single letter that can vary. Examples:

wom*n retrieves ...
   woman and women

dog* retrieves ...
  dog and dogs; it does NOT retrieve dogmatic nor dogged