Finance Research: Company Information

This guide gathers in one place the links to company financial datasets, industry ratios, background information, news on finance topics and academic research articles for corporate finance and financial markets.

Need to create a company list or find a company to research?

These resources are great for finding out key companies operating in an industry and/or identifying one company you want to research.

The instructions below help anyone use our resources when they want to lookup a specific company or find an unknown one. The highlighted resources originally were selected for an upper-level undergraduate class that had to find and pick a public company to study. Some students knew which company they wanted to study. Others wanted to browse to pick a company or look at a short list of options.

How do I find publicly traded companies easily?

Everyone eventually develops their own favorite way to find and follow public companies. Below are some common ones.

Note - if you need absolutely accurate company financials for your coursework, do not use Yahoo Finance or Gale Business Insights. Instead use any of the resources under the Financials & SEC filings tab of this guide.

Option A: Browsing

Yahoo: Finance
Path = pick an Industry (listed as a menu option under the ... symbol)

Gale Business Insights
- This link opens in a new window
It is very easy to choose the Browse > Companies path on the landing page. GBI easily lets you subset by only public companies, and broad parameters like industry or geography.

Option B: Look-ups

Gale Business Insights
- This link opens in a new window
Try a company name in the search box. Click on a company name in the results list, you will see detailed profile information. Public companies have a ticker symbol, the exchange, SIC and NAICS codes, company website, and fiscal year will be noted.
Mergent Online
Do a company search, then either look up what's under the ‘competitors’ or take a look at the ‘equity reports’ tabs

Option C: Create Company Lists

Mergent Online
Use the Advanced Search tab to open a dashboard that lets you build a list based on criteria like company size, geography, industry, or financial benchmarks
Nexis Uni
On the landing page, scroll down to Discover Topics: Business and click that so you can get to the Company Dossier dashboard. Choose “Create a Company List” and once on that page, choose “Create a Company List.”
LSEG Refinitiv Workspace
Workspace provides financial and economic data, news, equity reports, and company & industry analysis. Its international in scope and covers both public and private company information. Workspace is most often used for investment analysts’ reports, public company financials & filings, business news, economic indicators, stock prices, and data, and a variety of instruments (bonds, commodities, currencies, ETFs, futures, indexes, options and more). Unique content includes ESG data, performance forecasts & consensus estimates, deals & transactions (M&A, IPOs, venture capital & private equity). Download limit of 150 pages per day, reset daily at midnight local time. New users complete self-registration here - https://my.refinitiv.com/productregistration.html
Workspace is only available to UC San Diego students, faculty, and staff; only for non-commercial, academic research. It replaces ThomsonONE/Investext and Datastream, and now works across several browsers.

Register only once; otherwise login to Workspace using the main link. You may use web or desktop app version (includes the Workspace add-in for Excel), once you are registered.