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The accuracy and reliability of data, information, and research published on websites – public, corporate, news, is subject to continuous review and evaluation to establish its accuracy, reliability and usefulness specific to the areas that pertain to your specific work. The requirements of many faceted work product, deliverables, assignments, publications, reports and specialized expert services demand that we in essence continually, rapidly, and effectively boil the vast ocean of knowledge that is often in a continuous state of change. As expert researchers, our work is time sensitive yet requires comprehensive examination of multiple sources, cross-checking data and routinely performing due diligence reviews on sources and publications which we cite and from which we source data. But the internet is a dynamic ecosytem – sites often change URLs, the subject matter, focus and perspective may be impacted for reasons that are financial, political or even personal, and ownership of sites may change resulting in dramatic changes to the quality and reliability of a site’s content. With increasing frequency, sites go offline, with little or no notification to users, even if they are subscription based. New sites and services pop up, and researchers are challenged to make quick determinations as to their value. However, we have just so many hours in our work day so we identify and rely upon tools and resources that effectively and accurately meet our requirements.

This guide is focused on multi-disciplinary researchers. This latest version of the guide includes dozens of updated links, deletion of sites that are no longer live, as well as numerous new entries throughout. For 21 years LLRX has not changed URL and remains an independent, non-affiliated, one woman owned and edited publication – so please keep me on your list of reliable resources for research and knowledge management. Thank you.

Selected Search Engines, Web Archives, Open Data Repositories – facilitate locating information, data and analytics via: Web, Blogs, News, Video and Opt-In Alerts.

Web and Data Search – searching and locating relevant, reliable and actionable information will benefit from consistently using a range of search engines, sources, applications and strategies in your research process. A selection of sources from which you may consider with assurance, dependent upon your specific research requirements, are as follows:

beSpacific is a free, factual current awareness research blog launched in 2002 – focused on reliable, comprehensive coverage of topical global news about and resources on subject matters that includes: law, government documents, finance, economics, healthcare, education, technology, cyber-security, privacy, civil liberties, and issues related to libraries in all sectors. Deep links located via expert, thorough research provide readers with direct access to an extensive range of timely documents from the government, academe, NGOs/IGOs, advocacy groups, corporate and legal sectors. Sources include state, federal and foreign governments, open access databases, surveys, technical reports and education-based sources from legal, government, library, advocacy and academic communities, as well as from information innovators. The searchable database has over 44,000 postings, and is updated daily – https://www.bespacific.com. See also thebeSpacific Twitter feed. Readers may also subscribe to free weekday updates providing the complete set of daily postings in one HTML email. beSpacific was recognized in the ABA Top 100 Bawg for 2016. beSpacific is the sister site to LLRX.com

BananaSLUG – Powered by Bing. “BananaSlug is all about serendipity: finding the unexpected in the trillion+ web pages Google indexes. Google usually gives you pages most relevant to your search term, based on the pages’ popularity on the Web. You may never see some of the pages way down the list that are relevant or interesting, but off the beaten path. So we give you a little boost. We “seed” your search with another word, chosen at random, and this accidental encounter results in pages you may have overlooked.“

Bing from Microsoft has a social media focus, replete with “images of the day” as well as top stories accompanying selected images. Search the web, news, images, videos, maps. Links to MSN, Office Online and Outlook.com integrate your office and desktop applications seamlessly. Sign in perhaps access to your own search history, saved searches and updates/alerts. Maps [U.S. and globa] include – directions – driving walking, transit, traffic updates, commerce, gas prices, parking finder, taxi fares, travel info, history, weather and more e-commerce related content. The Bing Help directory provides user-friendly explanations for features and tools, including email alerts, updates and available search options. The Bing Help directory provides user-friendly explanations for features and tools, including email alerts, updates and available search options. See also the Bing Search Options page.

CiteSeer^x “is an evolving scientific literature digital library and search engine that has focused primarily on the literature in computer and information science. CiteSeer^x aims to improve the dissemination of scientific literature and to provide improvements in functionality, usability, availability, cost, comprehensiveness, efficiency, and timeliness in the access of scientific and scholarly knowledge. Rather than creating just another digital library, CiteSeer^x attempts to provide resources such as algorithms, data, metadata, services, techniques, and software that can be used to promote other digital libraries. CiteSeer^x has developed new methods and algorithms to index PostScript and PDF research articles on the Web. Citeseerx provides the following features.”

From InfoSpace, a reliable metasearch engine is dogpile. “InfoSpace created the Dogpile search engine because your time is important to us. Powered by Metasearch technology, Dogpile returns all the best results from leading search engines including Google and Yahoo!, so you find what you’re looking for faster. Each search engine has its own method of searching and each will return different results. Dogpile looks at all of them, decides which are most relevant to your search, eliminates duplicates and reveals them to you. In the end, you get a list of results more complete than anywhere else on the Web.

“BASE is one of the world’s most voluminous search engines especially for academic web resources. BASE provides more than 100 million documents from more than 5,000 sources. You can access the full texts of about 60% of the indexed documents for free (Open Access). BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library. We are indexing the metadata of all kinds of academically relevant resources – journals, institutional repositories, digital collections etc. – which provide an OAI interface and use OAI-PMH for providing their contents (see our Golden Rules for Repository Managers and learn more about OAI at the Open Archives Initiative or Wikipedia). The index is continuously enhanced by integrating further sources (you can suggest a source which is not indexed yet). We are working on several new features like a claiming service for authors within the ORCID DE project. BASE is a registered OAI service provider. Database managers can integrate the BASE index into their local infrastructure (e.g. meta search engines, library catalogues). Further on there are several tools and services for users, database and repository managers.”

“The CyberCemetery is  an archive of government websites that have ceased operation (usually websites of defunct government agencies and commissions that have issued a final report). This collection features a variety of topics indicative of the broad nature of government information. In particular, this collection features websites that cover topics supporting the university’s curriculum and particular program strengths.” http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/ 

DuckDuckGo – “The search engine that doesn’t track you – At DuckDuckGo, our vision is to raise the standard of trust online, and in service of that vision, our mission is to be the world’s most trusted search engine. We are proud to say that at the end of last year, we surpassed a cumulative count of 10 billion anonymous searches served, with over 4 billion in 2016! We are growing faster than ever with our first 14M day on Jan 10, 2017. This is a search engine with: • Way more instant answers – DuckDuckGo enables you to search 100s of other sites directly (see the Help Library to help leverage the site’s commands and strategies) using the site’s various features, tools and applications). Just use the drop-down next to the search box. As you use it, your most frequented sites will automatically be displayed at the top. • Way less spam and clutter. • Lots and lots of goodies – search fields for conversions, calculations, facts, zero-click info sources • and Real privacy – DuckDuckGo does not collect or share personal information.” This site hosts an excellent blog that provides actionable information to protect you and your devices from malicious intrusion, ad tracking and collection of your personal data by the vendors of your respective hardware and smartphones.

Exalead – Search for results from specific locations and sources (web sites, video, images, or Wikipedia). Use the advanced search feature, located to the right of the the main search box which opens as a drop-down menu, to specify: Exact Phrases, Exact Words, Exclude terms, Proximity Search, Search by Date or Date Range, and to Search by Title, URL, Link or specific Site.

Facebook is the world’s largest online social network, with more than 1.94 billion active monthly users as of first quarter 2017. Users may review features, new developments for mobile, features, and company information, via the Facebook Newsroom. Users may review Facebook user statistics and demographics here. Via Wikipedia: Facebook Graph Search “is a semantic search engine that was introduced by Facebook in March 2013. It is designed to give answers to user natural language queries rather than a list of links. The Graph Search feature combines the big data acquired from its over one billion users and external data into a search engine providing user-specific search results. In a presentation headed by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, it was announced that the Graph Search algorithm finds information from within a user’s network of friends. Additional results will be provided by Microsoft’s Bing search engine. In July it was made available to all users using the U.S. English version of Facebook. http://www.facebook.com/. Facebook has received considerable press since a revelation in June 2014 that went viral and whose details have resulted in many users re-examining their use of this service – see beSpacific for more details – Facebook tinkered with users’ feeds for a massive psychology experiment – Study.

Gigablast – As of 2015, Gigablast is one of the remaining four search engines in the United States that maintains its own searchable index of over a billion pages. Users may search the web or a selected topical directory. Try the Advanced Search feature to specify words, phrases, specific URLs and pages. After results are delivered, users may “Search in Category”, view related topics, view cached versions of search results. An example of a search for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) produces results with no advertisements, and also provides immediate comparative results from Google and Bing. http://gigablast.com.

Global Law Search Engine – “Global-Regulation Inc. Vision: To make all of the world’s laws accessible to users in a way that’s as easy as a Google search. The Global Law Search Engine – Search 1,610,446 laws from 90 countries, in English. Find, compare and analyse more than 825,000 laws translated into English from 26 languages. If our database was a book it would be approximately 7.67 million pages (2,108,193,898 words).”

Google – From a formerly crowded field a decade ago, there are now just two remaining major search engine powerhouses (others can argue but when was the last time you used Yahoo) – Bing, and Google. Google maintained the spot as Most Popular Search Engine in 2017, with various polls tracking it with up to 70% of core search queries conducted. Users may choose to sign into one of their respective Google accounts to conduct a search, or not. Google is available in iterations for phone, tablet or laptop. Searches may be conducted by using a keyboard or key pad, or by voice command. Users may choose to use encrypted Google Search. See also the Google Advanced Search feature. The Google Help Center provides text and video assistance for all aspects of search functionality on all devices.

Google Scholar – “From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and legal opinions and journals and patents” (NYU Libraries posted an excellent guide to Advanced Scholar search – updated in October 2016. Please note that searching university catalogs and resources and then linking to respective subscriptions materials is often to enrolled students and some time alumni.) Sources include academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites (use this site for Scholar Site preference search). See also Advanced Scholar Search tips to narrow and focus your scholarly content research results, as well as trying the menu that appears on the left hand side of the main search screen (if you are signed into one of the Google apps –  Overview / Searching / Alerts / Library / Export / Coverage / Corrections / Questions / – allowing a choice of content including searching for court opinions and within certain jurisdictions.  See also Sort by date for legal search and Google Scholar library, “your personal collection of articles in Scholar. You can save articles right from the search page, organize them by topic, and use the power of Scholar’s full-text search & ranking to quickly find just the one you want – at any time and from anywhere.” See also Scholar Updates: Making New Connections – and create a public Scholar profile; Finding significant citations for legal opinions.

Google News Search (use the drop-down menu that appears when you arrive at this site, and make use of advanced search features to obtain more focused, accurate results). Users may also choose to: search news from specific countries; and view the news results accompanied by images, annotations and social media links, or just view the headlines. Users who sign in to one of their respective Google accounts have seamless access to Google News and Google Search applications.

governmentattic.org “provides electronic copies of thousands of interesting Federal Government documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. This site provides the full text of current and historical documents, reports on items in the news” and reports that are otherwise not in the public domain without the intervention of the FOIA process. The site is a huge repository of government documents specific to agencies, topics and identified by time frame, accompanied by the FOIA requests through which the documents were obtained. governmentattic.org

Justia – Reliable, timely, comprehensive directory of primary and secondary legal resources, searchable and browsable by practice areas, topics and subject specific sources, cases in the news, legal blogs and expert commentary – http://www.justia.com/. Justia provides Free Daily Newsletters of Opinion Summaries for the US Supreme Court, all US Federal Appellate Courts & the 50 US State Supreme Courts and Weekly Practice Area Opinion Summaries Newsletters. Use this Link to Subscribe.

Law.com Search – a legal search engine from ALM, owner of leading legal local and national legal publications. “Search brings legal professionals relevant results from across the Law.com network of sites and the legal web, including hundreds of hand-picked law firm websites and legal blogs.” Large portions of the site’s resource http://www.law.com/resources are only available to subscribers.

LinkedIn: “World’s Largest Professional Network” – With 500 million members. http://www.linkedin.com/. The site is now 15 years old. Although portions of the site are available free, users are offered tiered pricing subscription options to access additional information about members, as well as about their connections, to share their respective information, to search for and join topical knowledge sharing groups, to seek and to provide performance recommendations, as well as to block others from connecting. The site has become a benchmark for researching colleagues, job candidates, as well as for identifying key information on organizations, companies, academe, NGOs, government agencies and market sectors. Users may post their blog and twitter feeds and open them for network comments, request and market specialized expertise and services, and email one another via a LinkedIn email address. This a go-to site for competitive intelligence about individuals, organizations, customers, clients, and also for learning, education and knowledge management.

OAIster “is a union catalog of millions of records that represent open access resources. This catalog was built through harvesting from open access collections worldwide using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Today, OAIster includes more than 50 million records that represent digital resources from more than 2,000 contributors.” http://www.oclc.org/oaister.en.html

OneLook – Dictionary Search “18,955,870 words in 1061 dictionaries indexed.” http://www.onelook.com/

Project MUSE “is a leading provider of digital humanities and social sciences content since 1995, its electronic journal collections have supported a wide array of research needs at academic, public, special, and school libraries worldwide. MUSE books and journals, from leading university presses and scholarly societies, are fully integrated for search and discovery.” Try the site’s Advanced Search Feature – http://muse.jhu.edu/search/advanced#firstLoad

Search Engine Colossus, International Directory of Search Engines – links to search engines from 317 countries and territories around the world – http://www.searchenginecolossus.com/

ReportLinker – “is a technology company that simplifies how analysts and decision makers get industry data for their business thanks to:

• latest reports & slideshows with insights from top research analysts that provide full understanding of how 5,000+ industry sectors work (industry overview, key players, market drivers…)
• 60 Million easily actionable statistics with tables, figures & datasets (sales forecasts, market shares, production data…)
• More than 25,000 trusted sources such as government agencies, international organizations, consultancies, industry associations….” http://www.reportlinker.com/

Science Direct’s search engine covers both subscription and open sources journals – and can be filtered by subject. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journals 

StartPage by Ixquick is another specialized “privacy” search engine. The company claims to permit users to conduct private searches – no tracking of your IP address, browser information and no storage of your search history to minimize intrusion by unsolicited e-commerce. Search the web, images, video. An advanced search feature is available and suggested for researchers. This site offers the user a proxy option – you are anonymous to the site(s) that you are visiting. The site(s) you visit will see Ixquick’s IP address, not the IP address from which your search originates. This option will slow your search experience but is useful.

TinEye “is an image search and recognition company. We are experts in computer vision, pattern recognition, neural networks and machine learning. Our mission is to make your images searchable. For more information, please see our FAQ, and for some actual TinEye search examples, see Extensions, widgets & badges.”

Trademarkia is the free internet search engine for over 6 million trademarked names, logos and slogans filed since 1870. Search for a trademark by: name, filing date(s), category, goods & services, company name, status. Users may also conduct free European Trademark searches as well as International Trademark searches, by choosing specific countries.

TRID, the TRIS and ITRD Database  – “TRID is the world’s largest and most comprehensive bibliographic source on transportation information. It contains more than 1.1 million records of published and ongoing research, covering all modes and disciplines of transportation. The TRID Database is available on TRB’s website at trid.trb.org

“Twitter has 313 million monthly active users – [access requires username and password]. it is a real-time information network that connects you to the latest information from around the world on a huge range of topics, people, events, products, statistics, data, photographs, commentary, politics (anything you can think of you can probably search for and find information about on Twitter] Twitter Search engine as well as an Advanced Search page. See also the Twitter guide book by Mashable.

USA.gov is the official U.S. portal to federal, state, local, tribal, and international government information and services.” Use Search.usa.gov, “a comprehensive, searchable index of about 50 million pages from federal, state, local, territorial, and tribal websites…We create and organize timely, needed government information and services and make them accessible to the public anytime, anywhere, via their channel of choice.”

Wiley Online Search Library – Use the advanced search feature http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/advanced/search to locate journal articles using field specific metadata as well as specific dates. Note – access to content is tied to subscription agreements.

World Bank Open Data – “Free and open access to global development data.” http://data.worldbank.org/

WTO Statistics Database allows you to retrieve statistical information in the following presentations:

• The Trade Profiles provide predefined information leaflets on the trade situation of members, observers and other selected economies;
• The Tariff Profiles provide information on the market access situation of members, observers and other selected economies;
• The Aid for Trade Profiles provide information on trends of aid for trade, trade costs, trade performance and development for selected Aid for Trade recipients;
• The Time Series section allows an interactive data retrieval of international trade statistics.
• http://stat.wto.org/Home/WSDBHome.aspx?Language=

Yahoo Search [Owned by Verizon] – Focus your search by choosing one of the following features: web, images, video, local, shopping, apps, news, directory, blogs, finance. The site also provides a helpful Advanced Web Search feature.

YouTube – YouTube has more than one billion unique visitors each month – it allows users to discover, watch and share originally-created videos. YouTube provides a forum for people to connect, inform, and inspire others across the globe and acts as a distribution platform for original content creators and advertisers large and small.” Users may search or browse topical categories that include: News & Politics, Nonprofits & Activism, People & Blogs, Science & Technology, Travel & Events. Additional education specific resources are available directly via YouTube EDU, which provides access to content in: Primary & Secondary Education, University & College, and Lifelong Learning areas.

Customized Topical Search Engines Developed by Academe and Professionals

Searching think tank, NGO and IGO information is an important facet of an effective search strategy. There are many organizations that comprise the “think tank” space, so it is significant that a number of search engines have been developed to focus on locating and surfacing this content.

American Policy Directory from the University of Oregon libraries, provides access to dozen of topical search engines specific to think tanks focuses on a range of issues that includes: business, civil rights, constitutional rights, consumer protection, economic rights, public finance, and women’s issues. Users may search all topics the site covers or individual topics. http://library.uoregon.edu/govdocs/apd.html

Find Policy – “Find Policy is the fastest way to find policy options. We target your search to leading policy research organizations. This solves a problem: search for policy with normal Google, and you will be swamped. With Find Policy you get quality results from leading think tanks. What topic are you interested in? Development, economic or foreign policy? Public policy in general? Choose a tab to go directly to your search page. Bookmark your favorite pages for faster access.  Under the More Search tab above you find more think tanks from around the world (Australia, Brazil, China, to mention ABC), more thematic search (accountability/corruption, conflict, donors, and much more), and more search for think tank experts.” http://www.findpolicy.org

Non-Governmental Organizations Search is a customized Google Search tool that was created by US and international info pros providing access to content specific to US and international NGOs.

Think Tank Search is the work of librarians at Harvard University. “Think Tank Search is a custom Google search of more than 600 think tank websites. For the purposes of this search, think tanks are defined as institutions affiliated with universities, governments, advocacy groups, foundations, non-governmental organizations, and businesses that generate public policy research, analysis, and activity. Inclusion is based upon the relevancy of subject area to HKS coursework and scholarship, the availability of the think tank’s research in full-text on the website, and the think tank’s reputation and influence upon policy making. The list represents a mixture of partisan and non-partisan think tanks.”

Open Source Research Archives and Portals

HathiTrust Digital Library – HathiTrust is a partnership of major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future. The mission of HathiTrust is to contribute to research, scholarship, and the common good by collaboratively collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating, and sharing the record of human knowledge. There are more than 120 partners in HathiTrust, and membership is open to institutions worldwide. The site provides Advanced Full-text Search as well as a Search Tips FAQ. Currently Digitized statistics are as follows: 15,327,879 total volumes; 7,575,379 book titles; 421,720 serial titles; 5,364,757,650 pages; 687 terabytes; 181 miles; 12,454 tons; 5,841,949 volumes(~38% of total) in the public domain. https://www.hathitrust.org.

Internet Archive – “The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in San Francisco, the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. The Internet Archive comprises millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more. “Between Fall 2016 and Spring 2017, the Internet Archive archived over 200 terabytes of government websites and data. This includes over 100TB of public websites and over 100TB of public data from federal FTP file servers totaling, together, over 350 million URLs/files. This includes over 70 million html pages, over 40 million PDFs and, towards the other end of the spectrum and for semantic web aficionados, 8 files of the text/turtle mime type. Other End of Term partners have also been vigorously preserving websites and data from the .gov/.mil web domains.” https://archive.org/

PLOS / Public Library of Science – “PLOS (Public Library of Science) is a nonprofit publisher, innovator and advocacy organization with a mission of leading a transformation in scientific and medical research communication. Every article we publish is open-access – freely available online for anyone to use – which benefits everyone, from researchers, educators, and patient advocates to funders, policymakers, and the public. Sharing research encourages progress – from protecting the biodiversity of our planet to finding more effective treatments for diseases such as AIDS or cancer.” https://www.plos.org/

Wayback Machine – “Explore more than 286 billion web pages saved over time. To start surfing the Wayback, type in the web address of a site or page where you would like to start, and press enter. Then select from the archived dates available. The resulting pages point to other archived pages at as close a date as possible.” This site is a critical tool for researchers as the disappearance of websites is accelerating, and with them, significant resources and knowledge are lost. As print libraries are concurrently disappearing, this site is a tremendous resource to locate information, software, images, movies, online games and a plethora of other intellectual property that is no longer actively maintained or accessible using the original source URLs. https://archive.org/

Federated Search

The power and relevance of federated search is succinctly described as mining the deep web, and explained by the Department of Energy’s Office of Scientific & Technical Information: “WorldWideScience.org is a global science gateway comprised of national and international scientific databases and portals. WorldWideScience.org accelerates scientific discovery and progress by providing one-stop searching of databases from around the world (Architecture: What is under the Hood). Multilingual WorldWideScience.org provides real-time searching and translation of globally-dispersed multilingual scientific literature.” The WorldWideScience Alliance, a multilateral partnership, consists of participating member countries and provides the governance structure for WorldWideScience.org.”

See also Deep Web Research and Discovery Resources 2017, by Marcus P. Zillman – an extensive and diverse bibliography of applications, sources, services, and tools to facilitate mining the deep web.

EconPapers – “Use the RePEc bibliographic and author data, providing access to the largest collection of online Economics working papers and journal articles. The majority of the full text files are freely available, but some (typically journal articles) require that you or your organization subscribe to the service providing the full text file. RePEc is a distributed data set residing in over 1100 archives operated by research organizations, academic departments and publishers.”

Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP) is the finding tool for federal publications that includes descriptive records for historical and current publications and provides direct links to those that are available online. Users can search by authoring agency, title, subject, and general key word, or click on “Advanced Search” to create searches that use specific fields and keywords, date ranges, formats and that are published in languages other than English. http://catalog.gpo.gov/F

Google Scholar Advanced Search – “search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites.”

As a subset of Google Scholar, please note the following: “A Google Scholar Universal Gadget which enables users to search for the total number of citations of author(s). It provides a total citation count, total number of cited publications and Jorge E. Hirsch’s H-Index.”

Google Scholar Metrics include journal articles from websites that follow our inclusion guidelines, selected conference articles in Computer Science & Electrical Engineering and pre-prints from arXiv, SSRN, NBER, and RePEc. As in previous releases, publications with fewer than 100 articles in the covered period, or publications that received no citations are not included.” https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/metrics.html 

MetaLib, a service of the Catalog of U.S. Government Publications is a federated search engine that searches multiple U.S. Federal government databases, retrieving reports, articles, and citations while providing direct links to selected resources available online. To learn more, view additional brief or detailed search information. http://metalib.gpo.gov/V?RN=990715120

“Microsoft Academic Search – Microsoft Academic Search is a free service developed by Microsoft Research to help scholars, scientists, students, and practitioners quickly and easily find academic content, researchers, institutions, and activities. Microsoft Academic Search indexes not only millions of academic papers, it also surfaces key relationships between and among subjects, content, and authors in a manner that highlights the critical links that help define scientific research. Microsoft Academic Search makes it easy for you to direct your search experience in interesting and heretofore hidden directions with its suite of unique features and visualizations.” The advanced search feature allows users to target the following fields: Author | Conference | Journal | Organization | Year | DOI.

“Microsoft Academic 2.0 is now open for public preview. Manage your academic profile and how you’re represented in the Academic Knowledge graph. Follow authors, institutions, journals, conferences and topics to create your own personalized research feed. Click here to learn more.”

“Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is a world wide collaborative of over 175,000 authors and more than 1.3 million users that is devoted to the rapid worldwide dissemination of social science research. Founded in 1994, it is composed of a number of specialized research networks in each of the social sciences. Each of SSRN’s networks encourages the early distribution of research results by reviewing and distributing submitted abstracts and full text papers from scholars around the world. SSRN encourages readers to communicate directly with other subscribers and authors concerning their own and other’s research. Through our email abstracting eJournals we currently reach over 400,000 people in approximately 140 different countries. SSRN’s email abstracting eJournals cover over 1,000 different subject areas. The SSRN eLibrary consists of two parts: an Abstract Database containing abstracts on over 642,800 scholarly working papers and forthcoming papers and an Electronic Paper Collection currently containing over 348,800 downloadable full text documents in Adobe Acrobat pdf format. The eLibrary also includes the research papers of a number of Fee Based Partner Publications. To browse SSRN’s eLibrary subject area networks, click here.” SSRN’s eLibrary provides 735,258 research papers from 340,171 researchers across 30 disciplines. SSRN is now owned by Elsevier.

StartPage by ixquick claims to be “the world’s most private search engine.” The company permit users to conduct private searches – with no tracking of your IP address or your browser information, and no storage of your search history to minimize intrusion by unsolicited commercial and non commercial enterprises. Search the web, images, video. An advanced feature is available and suggested. This site offers the user the proxy option wherein you are anonymous to the site you are visiting. The site will see ixquick’s IP address, not the IP address from which your search originates. This option will slow your search experience but may be useful

USA.gov – USA.gov is an interagency product administered by USAGov (formerly the Federal Citizen Information Center), a division of the U.S. General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Service. The is the U.S. Government’s official web portal for all government transactions, services, and information. https://www.usa.gov/

WorldWideScience.org “is a global science gateway—accelerating scientific discovery and progress through a multilateral partnership to enable federated searching of national and international scientific databases and portals. Researchers can search text, audio, video and images in multiple languages.

WorldCat.org – “WorldCat is the world’s largest network of library content and services. WorldCat libraries are dedicated to providing access to their resources on the Web, where most people start their search for information including books, DVDs, CDs and articles. WorldCat connects you to the collections and services of more than 10,000 libraries worldwide.” Learn more ›› https://www.worldcat.org/

Zillow – “Trusted source of free information on home prices, rental estimates, and other analytic tools for determining the value of nearly every available address in the US.” Zillow leverages big data analytics on home prices, rental estimates, county tax assessor data and other local government data on deeds, mortgages and real estate transactions, rental data, as well as American Community Survey and American Housing Survey results. On July 18, 2014 Zillow announced the acquisition of Trulia, a major competitor in the real estate marking sector. https://www.zillow.com/

Blog Search and Social Media

The ubiquity and power of social media is in no small measure responsible for a corresponding fall in the demand for blog specific search engines. This phenomenon correlates with the collapse of competition and choice in the web search sector – there are now just two dominant services: Google and Bing. Free and open blogs continue to flourish, even though many pundits are prematurely declaring their demise in the wake of the dominant social/professional media quartet: Twitter, Facebook (“one of the largest websites in the world, with more than 1.94 billion monthly users”) LinkedIn and Instagram. Researchers should resist the temptation to abandon blogs for ring fenced ecosystems comprised of multiple services controlled by one vendor. Read the postings of authors whose professional, accurate, current, well-documented, topical knowledge you determine will serve as an integral component of your specific CI/BI and research strategies. Selectively subscribe to specific RSS feeds hosted by blogs to benefit from continuously updated, value-added, actionable subject matter focused content. Information omnivores are the norm in the CI/BI and legal research professions, with good reason. As a profession we recognize the need to explore and engage extensive and varied research options. As a result of being so proactive in our research strategies, we are proficient in mining information from multiple sources when delivering services and work products.

BoardReader enables you to search message boards, websites, blogs, and other social media.

Justia Blawg Search – searchable directory of legal blog postings, continually updated. Sort results by date or relevance. Browse blogs by category, country, law school. https://blawgsearch.justia.com/

Social Searcher – Free Social Media Search Engine – “Monitor world wide web: news, blogs, forums, comments, videos. Advanced filtering technology for the web spam and analytics with source sites traffic ranks.” The sites API provides search results from: Twitter, Google+, Youtube, Instagram, Tumblr, Reddit, Flickr, Dailymotion and Vimeo. The free component of this site offers 100 Real-time Searches / Day. See also this sites’ Google Social Search page – “Top social search networks search results dashboard.” https://www.social-searcher.com/

Twitter is ubiquitous. When this site is used with intent, focus and discipline, it is a powerful resource for news, search and value added information from branded news sources, experts, organizations, and from individuals around the world. (posts are limited to a maximum of 140 characters). Use the excellent, field specific Advanced Search. See also – How to Use Advanced Twitter Search. Twitter also has news search filters so users may search by individual names, photos, videos, news and broadcasts. The site also provides search operators for use in the advanced search modes. User name and password required, but access is free.

News Search and Real Time News Video

Bloomberg News – This is one of the premier news websites available, with real time updates that maintains a subject matter focus on the economy, finance, markets, business, technology, science and trending news (via a ticker) throughout the world. Users of the Bloomberg Terminal have access to news faster and with more comprehensive data, but this free site is exemplary in its delivery of high quality analysis, data and news. Users may specify their country to focus search results. The sites includes live news broadcasts with audio. http://www.bloomberg.com/news

Financial Times – world business, finance and political news (free email updates with fee based subscription to global online content) – http://www.ft.com/home/us

Google News – In juxtaposition to the Bloomberg News presentation of images and visual content driven design, Google News is text driven, using multiple side bars and drop down menus to choose search options – by country, subject matter, content type, and breaking news from around the world.  News is provided in text and video formats, identified by source and also includes time stamps. Search, browse and share news, updated continuously. Users may customize/personalize the news page view according to: country/locale; topics, frequency for delivery of updates, opt-in for email and or RSS news feed alerts delivered to computer or mobile devices. https://www.google.com/news

Google News archive advanced search – the drop-down navigation box appears when the user mouses’ over the search box, or clicks on the the down arrow in the search box. For Google News, users may choose to use fields to limit results specific to: words, phrases, date ranges, sources, locations. Sort results by: top stories, all news, images, blogs, any recent news [specifying: past hour, day, week, month, year], sort by relevant date [use the custom date range feature – results returned include “Pay-Per-View” content in abstract form with links to the source/publisher and commercial databases if available – some searches yield links to abstracts back to the 1900s]. Users may also choose to view local stories; specify city, state or zip code, search for articles by author, and by specific source. Users may also choose to hide duplicate results.  https://www.google.com/advanced_search

Justia News and Featured Case – sources include: ABA Journal, Law.com, Legal Times, Jurist, and legal blogs. https://news.justia.com/

NewsNow “is the UK’s first and leading home-grown and independent news aggregation service. Fully-automated, and on a continuous basis, NewsNow displays breaking headlines linking to news websites all around the world. NewsNow links to tens of thousands of publications, from top news brands to alternative news sources — all on a single platform. We operate thanks to our unique filing engine, which matches breaking news articles in real time against our thousands of carefully crafted keyword-based topic specifications — delivering relevant links to users, and relevant readers to publishers, in seconds. Our website, which is among the UK’s top news destinations, is generally visited by over 14M unique monthly visitors and receives in excess of 120 million page views per month.” http://www.newsnow.co.uk/h/

Newspaperindex.com – “List of the most important online newspapers and other news sources in all countries in the world. All the newspapers focus on general news, politics, debate and economy and they are free to access online. The newspapers are chosen in order to give journalists, researcher and others an overview of how the national media edit current topics. Choose country to see the newspapers.” http://www.newspaperindex.com/

Reuters Business & Financial News – Search quotes, news, video, pictures. Editions available from US and around the world. http://www.reuters.com/finance.

Reuters – “Reuters is the news and media division of Thomson Reuters. Thomson Reuters is the world’s largest international multimedia news agency, providing investing news, world news, business news, technology news, headline news, small business news, news alerts, personal finance, stock market, and mutual funds information available on Reuters.com, video, mobile, and interactive television platforms.” User may also subscribe to the site’s Feeds | Newsletters | Podcasts | Apps. http://www.reuters.com/

Yahoo News Search – US | World Shopping | Politics | Tech | Science | ABC News http://news.search.yahoo.com/. See also Yahoo Advanced Web Search to focus search terms, date range, file format, country, language and result requirements.

Creative Commons Search – “This search helps you find content published by authors who want you to share or reuse it, under certain conditions.” http://search.creativecommons.org. See also the new Creative Commons beta search – “Use this prototype to find images that you can use and remix across several open archives.”

WSJ.com – The majority of the Wall Street Journal online site is behind a paywall. Selected stories are accessible with no fee. https://www.wsj.com/. In addition, the WSJ.com publishes several dozen subject matter specific blogs.

News Search, Articles and Alerts

Google Alerts – updates from Web, news, blogs, real time, videos, discussions – frequency: as-it-happens, daily or weekly), via keyword searches created by the user – https://www.google.com/alerts

FindLaw newsletters – “…free online legal information, publishes over 40 email newsletters for consumers, business owners, and legal professionals. Whether you want the latest breaking legal document, a weekly update on the most recent cases from a particular court, or your daily legal news fix.” All of FindLaw.com’s newsletters are free, and available in HTML and plain text formats – http://newsletters.findlaw.com/

MarketWatch.com (powered by Dow Jones) – Content links include the following topics – Latest News, Top Stories, Market Pulse, Realtime Headlines, News Viewer, Markets, Investing, Personal Finance, Retirement, Economy Real Estate.

Mondaq – “We are a growing independent company with a great global reach. For the past 20 years we have been creating one of the world’s most comprehensive online resources of professionals’ expertise and knowledge. Mondaq includes legal, financial and regulatory information from over 70 countries – and because we’re really nice folks, we provide it to readers absolutely free.” http://www.mondaq.com/

Selected Business Info Websites and Databases – Fee and Free

Fee Based Sites and Databases

ETS: Best Free Reference Web Sites Combined Index, 1999-2016 – “This is an index of the web sites included in the 1999-2016 annual lists issued by the MARS Best Free Reference Web Sites Committee of the MARS: Emerging Technologies in Reference Section of the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) of ALA to recognize outstanding reference sites on the World Wide Web.” http://www.ala.org/rusa/awards/etsbestindex

Data-Planet Statistical Datasets – “Easy access to the largest repository of standardized and structured statistical data. The Data-Planet™ repository contains more than 90 billion data points from more than 70 source organizations. The over two billion time series in Data-Planet provide immediate access to data presented in charts, maps, graphs and table form, with multiple points of entry. With the ability to instantly chart, map, and compare two billion time series at the county, MSA, census-tract, state and country level, Data-Planet is revolutionizing statistical research.”

LexisNexis Accurint, subscription req’d – “A direct connection to over 65 billion current public records. Detect fraud. Verify identities. Conduct investigations.” http://www.accurint.com

Standard & Poor’s, subscription req’d – “With over $4.5 trillion benchmarked to Standard & Poor’s family of indices, including the S&P 500, the S&P Global 1200, the S&P Europe 350, and S&P/Citigroup Global Equity Indices, Standard & Poor’s is the world’s largest index provider.” http://www.standardandpoors.com/en_US/web/guest/home

ViewsWire – Business Intelligence on 205 countries from the Economist Intelligence Unit, http://viewswire.eiu.com/?rf=0

Free Sites – some with registration and/or fee components

AFL-CIO Executive PayWatch – Data is available in the following topics – Highest Paid CEOs, Corporate Tax Avoiders, and Offshoring Jobs. https://aflcio.org/paywatch

Business Wire – “For more than 50 years, Business Wire has been the global leader in press release distribution and regulatory disclosure.” http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/

CORI Contracts Database – “The CORI K-Base library contains 690,997 contracts. Most of the contracts in the collection are executed agreements made available in public disclosure filings or in filings with a regulatory agency. Currently, the collection is primarily drawn from filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC’s) EDGAR Database. The required disclosure filings made by publicly traded companies frequently contain contracts that are of material interest to investors. CORI has downloaded, extracted, and categorized these contract filings to make them more directly available. In addition to the primary collection, special collections that were previously available only in hard copy are now available in the v1.1 CORI Digital Library Collection. These collections includes HMO-Physician agreements, sports stadium leases, container shipping contracts, and more, and is full-text searchable. First-time users must complete a free registration.” http://ronald.cori.missouri.edu/cori_search/

EDGAR Full-Text Search – “This page allows you to search the full text of EDGAR filings from the last four years. The full text of a filing includes all data in the filing as well as all attachments to the filing.” https://searchwww.sec.gov/EDGARFSClient/jsp/EDGAR_MainAccess.jsp

EIU.com – from the Economist intelligence unit – subscription or pay as you go options available, “analysis and forecasts on more than 203 countries and eight key industries.” http://viewswire.eu.com

Europages – 3 million European and international suppliers, manufacturers and distributors are listed in this B2B directory. http://www.europages.co.uk/

“The European Patent Register – “The European Patent Register contains all the publicly available information on European patent applications as they pass through the grant procedure, including oppositions, patent attorney/EPO correspondence and more. This service also provides for public file inspection – click on the “all documents” tab – and legal status information for the national phase.” https://register.epo.org/regviewer

Fortune – http://fortune.com/. See also the Fortune 500 annual ranking of America’s largest corporations.

Fortune 500 beta visualization – “People visit and revisit the Fortune 500 for lots of reasons, chief among them: job prospects, sales leads, corporate research and investor information. And bragging rights, of course. Here are two visualizations that allow you to explore the Fortune 500. On the map you’ll find every one of the U.S. headquarters from the 2016 list, on the line chart below it, you’ll see how each of the companies on the 2016 list has moved through the ranks for the past 20 years.” http://beta.fortune.com/fortune500/visualizations/?iid=recirc_f500landing-zone1

Forbes Lists (companies, sectors, markets, people, products – the biggest, best, richest, etc.) – http://www.forbes.com/lists/

Global Business Register – “Kyckr Company Index provides a single access point to official company information and company documents on companies from over 150 Registries worldwide. The information is sourced directly from the official national business registers of each country and is delivered in real-time to your desktop.” http://www.globalbusinessregister.co.uk

Google Finance – continuously updated news, analysis and data available via links on the homepage – market summary, recent quotes, today’s news, sector summary, today’s movers, domestic trends – https://www.google.com/finance

MarketWatch.com – Dow Jones – stock market quotes, business news, financial news – http://www.marketwatch.com/?siteid=&avatar=seen&dist=ctmw

MSN Money Central – continuously updated global market summaries, market news, company, fund and stock information – http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets

Moodys.com – subscription req’d, credit ratings, research and risk analysis. Press releases are free. – https://www.moodys.com/

Reuters Financials – continuously updated headlines, company information, analyst research, industry watch, stocks. Some data requires registration – https://www.reuters.com/sectors/financials

SEC Info – registration req’d – data from the SEC EDGAR database. Search by Name, Industry, Business, SIC Code, Area Code, Topic, CIK, Accession Number, File Number, Date, ZIP.  “The most-sophisticated U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) EDGAR^® database service on the Web, with billions of links added to Filings, Documents & Exhibits to enable easier navigation” – http://www.secinfo.com/

Time Business – news, commentary and views on the economy, markets and business – http://time.com/business/

ThomasNet.com – Find Suppliers and Source Products –  500,000+ suppliers, 6 million products, 10 million CAD drawings, 120+ years of serving industry – http://www.thomasnet.com/

Best-Performing Cities – “The Milken Institute’s annual Best-Performing Cities report identifies the latest trends and most relevant factors powering regional growth. Our index uses comprehensive, fact-based criteria to rank the nation’s metropolitan areas. This year’s findings reveal how technology and accelerating housing and consumer markets played significant roles in regional economies around the nation.”  http://www.best-cities.org/

United States Patent Office – USPTO Patent Full-Text and Image Database – http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-adv.htm

Who Owns What in Media – Columbia Journalism Review – http://archives.cjr.org/resources/

World Industrial Reporter – “Find industrial product and company information from around the world in one place.” Search fields: Global Products; Suppliers By Category; Company Name; Keyword. https://worldindustrialreporter.com/

Yahoo Finance – Aggregates news updates from major financial sources including: AP, CNBC, Zacks, Bloomberg, Business Insider, Reuters, MarketWatch, TheStreet. https://finance.yahoo.com/

Selected Historical Corporate Sector Data Sources

Via Harvard – Historic Corporate Reports – “Special Collections holds an extensive collection of corporate reports representing over 27,000 companies. This is one of the largest collections of corporate reports in the world, and includes annual reports, prospectuses, proxies, registration statements, and miscellaneous items such as brokerage-house reports, charts, and unpublished corporate histories. These holdings outline the trajectory of U.S. and international companies dating from 1820 to the present.” https://www.library.hbs.edu/Find/Collections-Archives/Special-Collections/Collections/Corporate-Reports

Via the Library of Congress – Selected Corporate Annual Reports Available at the Library of Congress. “Corporate annual reports are an important research tool, providing a window into how a company presents itself to its investors and the public and explains its corporate performance at a particular point in time. They allow the researcher to analyze a company’s performance in light of its corporate strategies and to compare its performance to that of its competition. Reporting requirements vary by country but such reports typically contain information on financial highlights; balance sheets; profit and loss statements; new business; projections; outstanding shares of stock and information on Board Members. The sources listed may be useful in identifying corporate annual reports available for use at the Library of Congress.” http://www.loc.gov/rr/business/AnnualReports/annualreports_main.html

DealBook by the New York Times – Topics include: Mergers & Acquisitions, Venture Capital, Private Equity, Hedge Funds, IPO Offerings, Venture Capital, Legal/Regulatory – http://www.nytimes.com/pages/business/dealbook/index.html

Financial Times Tech Blog – analysis and reviews (free) – http://blogs.ft.com/tech-blog/#axzz1iFxlNZJn. See also this list of all Financial Times Blogs.

footnoted* – “Each day, the site takes a closer look at the things that companies try to bury in their routine SEC filings.” This site requires a subscription but some content remains free. https://www.footnoted.com/

Real Time Economics – “Exclusive news, analysis and commentary on the U.S. and global economy, central bank policy and economics” from the Wall Street Journal (fee). https://blogs.wsj.com/economics/

Seeking Alpha – “We handpick articles from the world’s top market blogs, money managers, financial experts and investment newsletters – publishing approximately 250 articles daily. Seeking Alpha gives a voice to over 7,000 contributors, providing access to the nation’s most savvy and inquisitive investors. Our site is the only free, online source for over 1,500 public companies’ quarterly earnings call transcripts, including the S&P 500.” http://seekingalpha.com/

Selected Online People and Company Location Sources

Accurint (owned by LexisNexis) provides access to millions of data records on individuals and businesses – http://www.accurint.com

Ancestry.com – “genealogy, family trees and family history records online,” fee req’d – https://www.ancestry.com/

FamilySearch.org – “FamilySearch is the largest genealogy organization in the world. For over 100 years, FamilySearch has been actively gathering, preserving, and sharing genealogical records worldwide. Patrons may freely access our resources and service online at FamilySearch.org, or through over 4,500 family history centers in 70 countries, including the renowned Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah.” Users may search and view some data free, but fees do apply for many records. https://www.ancestry.com/

FindLaw Search for a Lawyer or for a Law Firm – http://lawyers.findlaw.com/lawyer/lawyer_dir/search/jsp/name_search.jsp

Forbes – search people, companies, money and investing, places, sports and lists. http://www.forbes.com/lists/

Google – Search web, images, news, video, maps, etc. https://www.google.com

Infobel – This site is based in Brussel, Belgium and provides free search for companies land owners in countries around the globe. http://www.infobel.com/

Justia Lawyer Directory – Find Attorneys, Law Firms, Legal Aid and Legal Services – https://www.justia.com/lawyers

Martindale.com – Search and/or browse this extensive database for credentials on over 1 million participating lawyers and law firms. https://www.martindale.com

Pipl People Search – “The most comprehensive people search on the web (with more than 3 billion listings and growing each day).” https://pipl.com/

Search Systems – “Your guide to Free Public Records. We’ve worked for 17 years to take the guesswork out of finding public record information online. We’ve located, analyzed, described, and organized links to over 55,000 databases by type and location to help you find property, criminal, court, birth, death, marriage, divorce records, licenses, deeds, mortgages, corporate records, business registration, and many other public record resources quickly, easily, and for free.” http://publicrecords.searchsystems.net/

Zaba Search –  Free people search. http://www.zabasearch.com/

Television and Radio News Transcripts – including streaming audio/video [Fee and Free]

Bloomberg.com Live – 24-hour business and financial news via Bloomberg. Free and Fee. Topics include: Markets, Tech, Pursuits, Politics, Opinion, Businessweek. https://www.bloomberg.com/live

CBSNews.com – Along with breaking news headlines and stories, the site links to investigative shows and news programs, as well as video. http://www.cbsnews.com/

Critical Mention – “Critical Mention captures and indexes 40 hours of broadcast content every 60 seconds from more than 2,000 unique broadcast sources producing a robust database of more than 16 million searchable segments, all available in broadcast quality definition and in real-time.” Subscription only. http://www.criticalmention.com/media-monitoring/

Google Video search – https://www.google.com/videohp. See also YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/, owned by Google.

Yahoo! Video Search – “Yahoo! Video allows you to search millions of videos from across the Web.” http://video.search.yahoo.com/

ShadowTV – “Servicing clients since 1999, ShadowTV is located in the historic Film Center building in the heart of New York City. The company is known as a leader in developing cutting edge technologies, and created the first real-time video streaming technology. ShadowTV is the fastest, easiest-to-use media monitoring service. We provide access to all the news coverage you need: TV, Internet, Print and Radio. From Wall Street to the White House, Madison Avenue to Hollywood, ShadowTV is used to monitor news for competitive intelligence, shareholder relations, brand management and media crisis strategy. Corporate communications directors, publicists, broadcast executives and feature film producers, print and network news writers and researchers, entertainment and political figures all rely on ShadowTV’s reports and alerts.” Subscription Only. – http://www.shadowtv.com/

TVEyes – The Search Engine for Broadcast – “Founded in 1999, TVEyes’s mission is to be the global search engine for TV and radio coverage. No matter where it appears in the world, if it aired on TV, you’ll find it on TVEyes. When businesses, PIOs, elected officials, non-profits, schools, and PR pros need to know what was aired on TV or radio, TVEyes is their go-to resource for everything broadcast..” Subscription Only. http://www.tveyes.com

Tyndall Report Year in Review –  “The Tyndall Report monitors the weekday nightly newscasts of the three American broadcast television networks: ABC World News with David Muir (formerly Charles Gibson and subsequently Diane Sawyer), CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley (formerly Katie Couric) and NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt (formerly Brian Williams). Each day, Andrew Tyndall blogs the three newscasts. He has been monitoring television news for 20 years. He claims to be the only person on the planet who has personally watched every single weekday network nightly newscast since the summer of 1987. Other people go on vacation: he records them all and logs the news he missed into his database when he returns.”   http://tyndallreport.com/

Federal News Service – “Fast, accurate verbatim transcripts for political events in Washington that affect you. Targeted content delivered within hours of the event through our Transcript Database or individually through our online store.” Subscription Only. http://www.fednews.com

Vanderbilt Television News Archive – “The mission of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive focuses on creating, preserving and providing access to the news broadcasts from the U.S. national television networks. We create recordings of news broadcasts from the U.S. national television networks, preserve the content for future generations, and provide the widest access possible within the copyright limitations. We have been recording these broadcasts since August 5, 1968. The core of our collection consists of regularly scheduled newscasts from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and Fox News. We also record other news content as it happens beyond these newscasts, including material from other networks.” https://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/

YouTube [owned by Google] – “Founded in February 2005, YouTube allows billions of people to discover, watch and share originally-created videos. YouTube provides a forum for people to connect, inform, and inspire others across the globe and acts as a distribution platform for original content creators and advertisers large and small.” https://www.youtube.com/

Legislative Monitoring and Tracking

CQ Roll Call (Subscription Req’d) – owned by the Economist Group) – Congressional news, insights, analysis, legislative tracking, members and votes, advocacy tools. Legislative tracking and monitoring service offers users the ability to create customized delivery of services, including time sensitive alerts and updates, via website, email updates, and RSS. Bill tracking and monitoring, daily links to HotDocs, full-text CRS reports. http://cqrollcall.com/cq/

C-SPAN – C-SPAN is a private, non-profit public service of the cable television industry that covers the political process. C-SPAN receives no funding from any government. C-SPAN’s operating revenues come from license fees paid by cable systems and satellite companies that offer the network to their customers…C-SPAN provides access to the live gavel-to-gavel proceedings of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, and to other forums where public policy is discussed, debated and decided–all without editing, commentary or analysis and with a balanced presentation of points of view.” C-SPAN provides video, TV, radio and text based content. Video files are searchable. https://www.c-span.org/

FEDNET “is a credentialed news organization and the leading provider of Multimedia broadcast of the United States Congress. FedNet maintains a robust video network throughout the Capitol complex for use in broadcast and web-based production. FedNet began broadcasting Congress on the web in 1996 and since that time has broadcast over 5,000 live hearings, thousands of live press conferences and complete, gavel-to-gavel, live coverage of the Senate and House Floor Debates each day.” Subscription Only. http://www.fednet.net/

Congress.org. “Congress.org [owned by CQRollCall/The Economist Group] is a non-partisan website dedicated to building a knowledge base for professionals wishing to better engage their communities. Highlighting the latest trends, success stories, effective or creative implementations and more, professionals from a whole host of backgrounds, whether in marketing, government affairs, communications or otherwise, can share their knowledge and gain insight from the larger advocacy community. Congress.org embraces that advocacy has evolved – a letter writing campaign should no longer be considered an organization’s only option for effective legislator outreach. We look to help readers lead within the new paradigm, one that recognizes that consistent stakeholder education and involvement will lead to better results. Positioning your group as the trust worthy thought leader in the arena will only help as your issues evolve today and into the future.” http://www.congress.org

GovTrack.us – “GovTrack.us helps you keep tabs on the U.S. Congress. This site is not affiliated with the U.S. government; it is non-commercial, non-partisan, and an open source project. GovTrack.us is a project of Civic Impulse, LLC, a completely independent entity which is wholly owned by its operator and receives no funding in any form from outside organizations. We have no financers, sponsors, investors, or partners, nor do we have any affiliation or relationship (financial or otherwise) with any political party, government agency, or any other outside group or persons. We pay our operating costs through our advertising revenue (read our ad policy) and crowdfunding (support us on Patreon; see our 2015 project on Kickstarter). We’re a small organization with four part-time staff members. Joshua Tauberer, who started GovTrack as a hobby in 2004, is the organization’s founder and president. https://www.govtrack.us/

Roll Call – Graphics drive iteration of a print news journal, with continuously updated news (free and fee access) to daily online articles on policy, politics, including opinion/analysis (partisan), videos, podcasts and alerts – http://www.rollcall.com/

The Hill.com – Continuously updated news and views on legislation, legislators, politics, policy and the White House. The site hosts 6 topical blogs as well as alerts, podcasts, video and of course a Twitter feed. http://thehill.com/

Congress.gov – From the Library of Congress, legislative information, status of legislation, links to committee reports. https://beta.congress.gov

Washingtonwatch.com [at the time of this publication the site is on hiatus – I will update when it returns] tracks the bills in Congress, along with estimates about their costs or savings, when available. https://washingtonwatch.com/

E-Newsletters, Online Newspapers, Journals and News Sources

Biz Journals – (Subscription required – some content is free) “American City Business Journals (ACBJ) is the largest publisher of metropolitan business newsweeklies in the United States, with 43 business publications across the country reaching more than 3.6 million readers each week.” http://www.bizjournals.com/?t=1496095488.

Bloomberg News – This is one of the premier news websites available, with real time updates that maintains a subject matter focus on the economy, finance, markets, business, technology, science and trending news (via a ticker) throughout the world. Users of the Bloomberg Terminal have access to news faster and with more comprehensive data, but this free site is exemplary in its delivery of high quality analysis, data and news. Users may specify their country to focus search results. The sites includes live news broadcasts with audio. http://www.bloomberg.com/news

CNNMoney.com – Topical articles on business, tech, market, media, personal investment. http://money.cnn.com/.

Financial Times – free and fee; email updates and RSS feeds available to subscribers. Daily blog updates, video and podcasts. Comprehensive coverage of global markets. http://www.ft.com/home/us

Forbes – video network, features, blogs, columns, special reports – Europe, US and Asia. Search people, companies, lists. http://www.forbes.com/. See also the Advanced Search page.

Fortune – features, video, RSS, newsletters. http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/

Google Finance – Market Summary, Today’s Headlines, Company Facts and Financials, Related company data, a Company Summary, Management info, blog posts and links to topical discussions. http://www.google.com/finance

Investors Business Daily – some free, mostly fee. http://www.investors.com/

The Deal, subscription req’d. “…reports, analyzes and disseminates business and financial news that offers fresh insights on the deal economy.” http://www.thedeal.com/

Time Business – News and views on the economy, markets and business – http://time.com/business

Wall Street Journal – http://online.wsj.com/home-page: registered subscribers may opt-in for email updates, RSS, customized homepage, company and industry news trackers. Each day some articles are available free to readers without a subscription. All WSJ blogs, updated daily, provide reliable news and analysis with links to primary documents, and all are free via http://blogs.wsj.com. There are also corresponding Twitter and RSS feeds.

Wall Street Journal Market Data Center – Free market data, indexes, stock quotes, and more. http://markets.wsj.com/usoverview?mod=topnav_0_0012

Yahoo! Finance – market summaries, currencies, videos, quotes, rates, news features, opinions. https://finance.yahoo.com/

Yahoo! Financial News – top financial news – https://biz.yahoo.com/ne.html. See also Yahoo Finance Originals: Business https://finance.yahoo.com/yahoofinance/business/

Monitoring Trends, Companies and Products – Selected News Aggregators, RSS Feeds, Blog Search Engines

News Aggregators

BBC – excellent resource/how-to guide – popular BBC news feeds, global and UK news feeds, video and audio feeds – services for mobile, connected TV, alerts, e-mail news. http://www.bbc.com/news

Firefox Live Bookmarks – “automatically keeps track of updates for you so you always know when new content has been added to your favorite sites.”. http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/livebookmarks.html

Financial Times – RSS and Twitter feeds – http://www.ft.com/rss

Forbes.com RSS Feeds – http://www.forbes.com/fdc/rss.shtml

RSS feeds for Law.com – https://feeds.feedblitz.com/law/law-com-newswire

MarketWatch – http://www.marketwatch.com/rss/default.asp

New York Times Times Topics feeds collect news, reference, photos, graphics, audio and video on thousands of subjects, covering material published since 1981.” – http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/index.html

PR Newswire – http://www.prnewswire.com/rss/

Reuters News RSS Feeds – http://www.reuters.com/tools/rss

Wall Street Journal Digital Network RSS Feeds – http://www.wsj.com/public/page/rss_news_and_feeds.html

Washington Post RSS Feeds – http://www.washingtonpost.com/rss

Yahoo! News – Latest News & Headlines – http://news.yahoo.com/rss

Yahoo! Finance provides company news and commentary feeds in RSS – http://finance.yahoo.com/rssindex

Identification of Company Legal Representation

Corporate Counsel (ALM) – http://www.corpcounsel.com/?slreturn=20151120165426

Law.com Surveys and Rankings (Am Law 100, Am Law 200, Global 100, etc.) AmLaw Surveys, Lists, & Rankings (Am Law 100, Am Law 200, Global 100, etc.) – http://www.law.com/insights/rankings

LexisNexis CourtLink – “calendar proceedings (docket) of a lawsuit, and the documents that are filed during the course of that suit” – http://www.lexisnexis.com/en-us/products/courtlink-for-corporate-or-professionals.page

Comprehensive, annotated, up-to-date case law for state and federal jurisdictions, as well a hundreds of current and archival databases on law, government documents, news, and journals via Lexis or Westlaw

Directory of Corporate Affiliations – (Fee) http://www.corporateaffiliations.com/

Disclosure Online Database-US Public Company Profiles (Lexis), “contains business and financial information extracted from annual and periodic reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for over 10,000 publicly-owned companies” – http://www.lexisone.com/legalresearch/lnbcc/contentlistings/companyfinanciallisting1.html

Verdict Search – Search Over 170,000 Verdicts and case histories, state and nationwide verdicts (fees apply to obtain reports) http://verdictsearch.com/

Note: Law firm websites are a major source of strategic corporate intelligence – firm and practice specific entries, press releases, news alerts, topical blogs – be sure to track and monitor information from within this range of publications after you identify specific value added content.

LexisNexis Search permits users to locate sources, database files, reports and other topical information available via this publisher.

LawCrawler – Legal web and database search engine. http://web.lawcrawler.com/

Martindale.com – Search for lawyers, law firms and organizations, groups and topics, jobs. Results provide name, law firm, job title, link to website with bio and contact info is provided in many instances, city/state/county, telephone number. http://www.martindale.com/

Mergerstat M&A – “The Mergerstat database also includes more than 50,000 International transactions. Mergerstat covers U.S. transactions and crossborder transactions involving a U.S. parent company where the equity value is greater than $1 million and represents at least a 10 percent interest.” http://w3.nexis.com/sources/scripts/info.pl?156282

Nelson’s Public Company Profiles – “Public Company Profiles comprise brief descriptions of 22,000 publicly traded corporations worldwide and include contact information, key executives and business descriptions.” – http://www.lexisnexis.com/clients/CSCatalog/Site65/desrc_nelsonsPubPro.htm (via Lexis)

Pacer – “The PACER Service Center is the Federal Judiciary’s centralized registration, billing, and technical support center for electronic access to U.S. District, Bankruptcy, and Appellate court records.” Requires username and password – fees apply – http://www.pacer.gov/

Patent records, USPTO – http://patft.uspto.gov/

SDC Mergers & Acquisitions – http://w3.nexis.com/sources/scripts/info.pl?173725

Secretary of State and Other Business Filings Databases, published by LLRX.com – “All 50 states make some level of corporate and business filings available online. In a few instances only limited information (such as name availability) is retrievable. The majority of the states, however, use their Web presence to disseminate a range of public business records — and many offer access at no charge.” //www.llrx.com/columns/roundup29.htm

SECInfo.com – “Search by Name, Industry, Business, SIC Code, Area Code, Topic, CIK, Accession Number, File Number, Date, ZIP.” http://www.secinfo.com/

Standard & Poor’s Corporate Register, “The SPCORP file, derived from the Standard & Poor’s Register of Corporations, is the most comprehensive directory available of America’s top corporations and their key personnel.” http://w3.nexis.com/sources/scripts/info.pl?3669

Trademark Electronic Search System, USPTO – http://www.uspto.gov/trademark, fee –

America’s Corporate Finance Directory – http://www.lexisnexis.com/corpfinancedir/ also useful for identification of other outside service providers, including auditor, banker, pension manager, insurance carriers, investment banker, etc.

Westlaw CourtExpress – dockets and document retrieval services for state and federal jurisdictions, http://courtexpress.westlaw.com/

Selected Online Tools for Competitor Monitoring

Website Trackers

ChangeDetection – notifies users every time there is a change in designated websites – http://www.changedetection.com

“Domain Tools has been tracking the whois history of millions of domains since 2000. Domain History gives you access to our massive database of historical whois records. Supported TLDs are .com, .net, .org, .biz, .us, and .info. DomainTools offers an historical lookup of registrations back to 2001,” http://domain-history.domaintools.com/

InfoMinder – subscription service to track and monitor changes to websites, blogs, RSS feeds and wikis – http://www.infominder.com/webminder/index.jsp

MarkMonitor – http://www.markmonitor.com

WebSite Watcher – monitor websites for updates and changes – http://aignes.com

Web2Mail Lite – read, receive and browse the web by email – http://www.web2mail.com/lite/welcome.php

Westlaw and LexisNexis

Benchmarking – Law, Corporate, Government, Market Data

American Bar Association (ABA) Statistics on the Legal Profession – http://www.americanbar.org/resources_for_lawyers/profession_statistics.html

American Lawyer – subscription (law firm and lawyer surveys, reports, articles, market data) – http://www.americanlawyer.com/index.jsp. See also the Law.com Blog Network for free, topical updates: http://www.law.com/jsp/law/lawblogs.jsp

Law.com Surveys, Lists and Rankings – (fee and free) – begin on this page to view the available data, reports, surveys and charts.

Chambers and Partners (fee and free) – “searchable database of the top lawyers in 175 countries, providing independent rankings and editorial commentary” – http://www.chambersandpartners.com/

CorporateAffiliations.com (LexisNexis – subscription only) http://www.lexisnexis.com/en-us/products/corporate-affiliations.page

FRASER (Federal Reserve Archival System for Economic Research) – “The Federal Reserve Archival System for Economic Research is a project by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis to expand on its mission to provide economic information and data to researchers interested in the U.S. economy. On this web site you will find links to scanned images (in Adobe Acrobat PDF format) of historical economic statistical publications, releases, and documents.” https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/

Fortune 500 annual ranking of America’s largest corporations – use the drop down menu to access archival data from 1955 to present – http://fortune.com/fortune500/

“The IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook (WCY) “is the world’s most renowned and comprehensive annual report on the competitiveness of nations, ranking and analyzing how a nation’s environment creates and sustains the competitiveness of enterprises…it measures 57 countries on the basis of 329 criteria.” http://www.imd.org/wcc/

Economic Indicators – “Available from April 1995 forward, this monthly publication is prepared by the Council of Economic Advisers for the Joint Economic Committee. It provides economic information on gross domestic product, income, employment, production, business activity, prices, money, credit, security markets, Federal finance, and international statistics. Economic Indicators back to 1948 are made available through FRASER, the Federal Reserve Archival System for Economic Research. FRASER is provided through a partnership between GPO and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. FRASER is not an official version of Economic Indicators and GPO can not guarantee the authenticity or completeness of the data. About Economic Indicators. http://www.census.gov/economic-indicators/

PROFIT Guide– “PROFITguide.com is Canada’s Online Guide to Business Success.” http://www.profitguide.com/

U.S. Census Bureau, Current Industrial Reports [funding terminated in 2012] – “The CIR program has been providing monthly, quarterly, and annual measures of industrial activity for many years. The primary objective of the CIR program is to produce timely, accurate data on production and shipments of selected products. The data are used to satisfy economic policy needs and for market analysis, forecasting, and decision-making in the private sector.” Includes Mining, Manufacturing and Construction Statistics. http://www.census.gov/manufacturing/cir/index.html

U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis – “The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) promotes a better understanding of the U.S. economy by providing the most timely, relevant, and accurate economic accounts data in an objective and cost-effective manner.” http://www.bea.gov/

U.S. Commercial Service – Market Research Library – “The U.S. Commercial Service is the trade promotion unit of the International Trade Administration. U.S. Commercial Service trade specialists in 107 U.S. cities and in more than 80 countries work with your company to help you get started in exporting or increase your sales to new global markets.” http://www.buyusainfo.net/adsearch.cfm?search_type=int&loadnav=no

Country Profiles

BBC News Country Profiles – “Full profiles provide an instant guide to history, politics and economic background of countries and territories, and background on key institutions. They also include audio or video clips from BBC archives.” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/country_profiles/default.stm

CIA World Factbook – “The World Factbook provides information on the history, people, government, economy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for 266 world entities. Our Reference tab includes: maps of the major world regions, as well as Flags of the World, a Physical Map of the World, a Political Map of the World, and a Standard Time Zones of the World map.” https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html

Economist.com – Country Briefings – “News, country profiles, forecasts, statistics” on more than 80 countries. http://www.economist.com/topics/

Doing Business – Measuring Business Regulation – World Bank Group: “The Doing Business project provides objective measures of business regulations for local firms in 185 economies and selected cities at the subnational level.” http://www.doingbusiness.org/

guardian.co.uk – World Fact Files: country profiles – click on the interactive map’s pins to read country profiles featured in the Guardian’s World Factfiles. http://www.theguardian.com/global/interactive/2009/apr/18/country-profiles-world-map

Index Mundi, Country Facts – “IndexMundi is a data portal that gathers facts and statistics from multiple sources and turns them into easy to use visuals.” http://www.indexmundi.com/

Library of Congress Country Studies – “This series of profiles of foreign nations is part of the Country Studies Program…The profiles offer brief, summarized information on a country’s historical background, geography, society, economy, transportation and telecommunications, government and politics, and national security.” http://www.loc.gov/collections/country-studies/about-this-collection/

World Bank’s Open Data – “The World Bank’s Open Data initiative is intended to provide all users with access to World Bank data. The data catalog is a listing of available World Bank datasets, include databases, pre-formatted tables and reports. Each of the listings includes a description of the data set and a direct link to that set. Where possible, the databases are linked directly to a selection screen to allow users to select the countries, indicators, and years they would like to search. Those search results can be exported in different formats. Users can also choose to download the entire database directly from the catalog.” Link

World Competitiveness Center – “We are dedicated to the advancement of knowledge on world competitiveness by offering benchmarking services for countries and companies using the latest and most relevant data on the subject.” http://www.imd.org/wcc

IGO and NGO Portals

IGOs and NGOs – Northwestern University Library – “An intergovernmental organization (IGO) is a structure based on a formal instrument of agreement between nations (e.g. the United Nations, the EU). A non-governmental organization (NGO) is a group whose members are individuals or associations (e.g. the International Committee of the Red Cross).The International Documents Collection contains the publications of approximately 25 IGOs and a few NGOs. The International Information Librarian maintains a guide with a comprehensive list of links to IGO web sites. http://www.library.northwestern.edu/libraries-collections/evanston-campus/government-information/international-documents/igos-and-ngos#modal-show

NGO Research Guide, Duke University Libraries – “The selection of NGOs listed here primarily reflects the research interests of Duke researchers and students – http://library.duke.edu/research/subject/guides/ngo_guide/ngo_database

SourceWatch Guide to Think Tanks and NGOs in the U.S. and Canada. “A think tank (also called a policy institute) is an organization, institute, corporation, or group that conducts research and engages in advocacy in public policy. Many think tanks are non-profit organizations, which some countries such as the United States and Canada provide with tax exempt status. While many think tanks are funded by governments, interest groups, or businesses, some think tanks also derive income from consulting or research work related to their mandate. In some cases, think tanks are little more than public relations fronts, usually headquartered in state or national seats of government and generating self-serving scholarship that serves the advocacy goals of their industry sponsors. Of course, some think tanks are more legitimate than that. Private funding does not necessarily make a researcher a shill, and some think-tanks produce worthwhile public policy research. In general, however, research from think tanks is ideologically driven in accordance with the interests of its funders.” http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Think_tanks

University of Minnesota Human Rights Library – https://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/

Wikipedia – Non-profit organizations based in Washington, D.C. – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Non-profit_organizations_based_in_Washington,_D.C.

Worldwide NGO Directory – “The World Association of Non-Governmental Organizations (WANGO) is an international organization uniting NGOs worldwide in the cause of advancing peace and global well being. WANGO helps to provide the mechanism and support needed for NGOs to connect, partner, share, inspire, and multiply their contributions to solve humanity’s basic problems. Initiated in 2000 by a handful of international NGOs and prominent visionaries, WANGO has quickly become one of the premier international bodies for non-governmental organizations that are committed to the ideals of universal peace, justice, and well being for all humanity. Concerned with universal values shared across the barriers of politics, culture, religion, race and ethnicity, the founding organizations and individuals envisioned an organization that would enable NGOs to work in partnership across those barriers, thereby weaving a selfless social fabric essential to establishing a worldwide culture of peace. By optimizing resources and sharing vital information, WANGO provides a means for NGOs to become more effective in completing their vital tasks. With its global network of NGOs, as well as affiliates drawn from the ranks of governmental and intergovernmental bodies, business, and universities, WANGO has become an international leader in tackling issues of serious global concern. Click on the region on the map, or click on the region name below the map to list organizations.” http://www.wango.org/resources.aspx?section=ngodir

Research Directories and Portals

A to Z Index of the Business Reference Services Web Site (Library of Congress) – http://www.loc.gov/rr/business/azindex.html

CEO Express – fee and free, with links to dozens of reliable business, industry, news and and topical resources – http://www.ceoexpress.com/home

HighBeam (fee) “is a magazine and newspaper archive, online library and research tool for students and professionals. We collect millions of research articles from 6,500 published sources you know and trust – and put them all in one place.” – http://www.highbeam.com/

LexisNexis – fee/subscription – http://www.lexis.com or http://www.nexis.com

MagPortal – search engine and directory for locating online magazine articles from over 200 periodicals – http://www.magportal.com/c/bus/

globalEdge – your source for global business knowledge – “A collection of resources and links to proprietary as well as free databases, guides, and learning tools via Michigan State University – http://globaledge.msu.edu/reference-desk/

Westlaw – fee/subscription – www.westlaw.com

Wall Street Executive Library – Directory of over 1,450 sources that includes: national/international news; company and industry, government, marketing and advertising, statistics and economic research – http://www.executivelibrary.com/

Editor’s Note: This guide was first published on November 20, 2005.

Completely revised and updated as follows by Sabrina I. Pacifici on: March 15, 2006, October 13, 2006, January 15, 2007, June 19, 2007, September 28, 2007, March 15, 2008, June 1, 2008, March 28, 2009, October 11, 2009, June 2, 2010, January 2011, March 2011, July 2011, December 2011, July 2012, September 2013 and August 8, 2014, December 18, 2015, and June 2, 2017.