Researching and Locating Employment in Chemistry: Researching a Corporation

 Perform an assignee name search on the Derwent Innovations Index. This resource allows you to search through more than 11 million worldwide patent records issued from 1963 to the present. You can either perform a keyword search for the company's name in the assignee field or look up the Derwent Assignee Code for your company and search for that in the expert search mod

 Go to the European Patent Office search page and perform a Quick Search for Persons or Organizations.  This will retrieve patents from the European Patent Office, the World Patent Office, the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and the patent offices of Germany, France, Britain, and Japan. The dates of coverage vary for the different patent offices; consult the help file available from the database

Search by Company/Organization on SciFinder Scholar. Refine your results by document type "patent."

Go to the United States Patent and Trademark Office search page and perform a Quick Search by Assignee Name. Input the name of the company you wish to search. If you are not sure of the exact syntax that the database uses to report the name, use Boolean operators AND,OR, or ANDNOT, as well as the Wildcard symbol, the $ (example/ Rohm AND Haas AND chemi$). This will retrieve all patents filed in the United States from 1976 to the present by inventors from this company.

Try searching for the company's Home Page, through a search of the Internet using a search engine like Google or by looking it up on one of the business databases listed below.
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Search SciFinder by Company/Organization for the name of the company. Note that if it is a large company, you will get a very large number of hits. Refine by Publication Year, choosing only the past ten years, to find their most current research. You can then Analyze by CA Index Term to categorize the papers into fields of research.

Search by address. The best way to do this is to type the institution's zip code in the address field, although you can do a search for the name of the company in the address field or the group name field.

The University of Pennsylvania Libraries have two particularly good, comprehensive news sources. In addition, you can find links to many individual newspapers by following this link, which leads to a list of the newspapers to which Penn subscribes.

LexisNexis Academic allows you to search major national and international newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the Times of London, and others.

Factiva (Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher recommended for best results) allows you to search national and international news sources, including the Wall Street Journal. It allows an extremely detailed search for articles dealing with particular industries or areas of research.

Corporate Affiliations is an international directory of more than 170,000 public or private parent companies and their subsidiaries. Historical data about company linkage goes back approximately 10 years, and the directory is updated weekly.

Hoover's Online provides company profiles for approximately 12 million public and private international companies. Information provided includes company histories, strategies, market positions, and major events, and in-depth coverage is given to the top 25,000 businesses worldwide. Hoover's is searchable by company name, industry keyword, ticker, or executive name, and you can browse companies by name, geography, industry, and stock index. Other search options include a search of news sources, reports, and IPO companies. The database is updated daily.

Thomas Register is the most comprehensive online resource for finding companies and products manufactured in North America. The resource requires free registration to search. Company profiles are rather sparse, but the Thomas Register is a good way to look up companies' contact information and a good way to find competition by seeing who sells a particular product.

Factiva is an excellent place to find news stories on topics of interest and lets you search for information by industry, geography, and other criteria. For more information on searching for company information in Factiva, please see Lippincott's Factiva search guide.

LexisNexis Academic is another source that can be used for company profiles, in addition to news. From the home page, click on the link at the left entitled Business. This will bring you to a list of options, including news, company information, and a business directory. Clicking on any one of these options will give you a search screen, from which you can search either for information about a specific company or for a list of companies that match criteria that you set. For more information on using LexisNexis for company information, please see Lippincott's LexisNexis search guide.

Lippincott Library's list of other company profiling sources may have some additional resources that could help you find company or industry information.