Scroll down to find tips and information on:
- Finding and using your company's website
- Using your company's Wikipedia article
- Finding company information on IBISWorld
You can find your company's website using a search engine such as DuckDuckGo (https://duckduckgo.com/). If using a search engine that automatically provides an AI summary, it is strongly suggested you ignore or turn off the AI summary, because these summaries frequently provide wrong information.
Many companies have a commercial website and a corporate website.
- The commercial website is intended to sell goods and services to consumers.
- The commercial website is often the first search-engine result.
- The corporate website will include corporate information such as information for investors and shareholders, press releases, values and mission statements, etc.
- Sometimes the corporate side of the website can be found through links on the commercial website. You can also try including keywords such as "investor relations" or "annual reports" in your search terms, which might give the corporate website as a first result.
You can decide whether the commercial website or the corporate website is more relevant to the kind of information you might use in a strategic plan.
If using a Wikipedia article, you will need to cite the specific version with the exact date it was last edited. See Purdue University's Online Writing Lab's page on Reference List: Electronic Sources for guidance (scroll down to "Wikipedia Article").
To get the date for the current version of an article:
1) Click on "View History:"
2) Click on the current version, at the top of the list:
3) The date you need to use will be confirmed at the top of the article:
You can find Company Benchamarking Reports for some (but not all) companies by entering the company name in the search box.
Company Benchmarking Reports may also be linked to in Industry Reports where the company is included as a major company in the industry (go to the "Companies" tab on the left side of the Industry Report).
If there is no Benchmarking Report for your company, go to the "Companies" tab on the left side of the relevant Industry Report -- in the section detailing major companies, there will be a dropdown menu to toggle between major companies, and information on each company.
TIP: In a Company Benchmarking Report, you can access different parts of the report by clicking on the menu on the left side of the screen -- sometimes more and better information is in the sections you have to click through to.
TIP: You can download or open the Company Benchmarking Report as a PDF. The PDF usually has a date of publication, which can make citation easier, but you can always use "n.d." instead of a date if you just use the web version.