Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies News

MEL’s Database of the Week for 3/4/11

March 4th, 2011

Welcome to Database of the Week — a feature from the Management & Economics Library (MEL). These database snapshots will give you basic information about our most relevant and beneficial online resources.

If you have a suggestion for a database or topic that should be covered, please let us know.

This Week’s Featured Database: Mintel, from Mintel Group.

Link: www.lib.purdue.edu/mel, in the pull down Quick Access to Business Databases alpha list right below the Libraries’ search box.

Description/focus: Mintel provides market research reports on consumer products and services.

Start with this hint: Mintel requires registration on first use.  The Mintel home page has a simple search box and a static menu bar.  Click on Report Categories to see the types of products covered in the database, then try one of the categories, such as retail.  The resulting page displays leads for the latest reports in the category, a list of all reports that fall into the category, news, companies, and even advertising news.  Select one of the reports to see the format of the homepage for the research reports: links in the index on the left take you to tables of statistics, market size and forecast, and other relevant information  Back on the menu bar, the Companies link includes a list of trade associations as well as basic information about specific companies.

Why you should know this database: Mintel is international in scope and includes reports on worldwide regions as well as specific countries.

Other common tools available in this database: fulltext reports; citation help; save reports for later retrieval.  For use of these tools in this database, contact Mary Dugan

How this database can be integrated into the curriculum: Mintel reports provide links to reports on related topics that could be relevant to a student’s research project.  Sources of statistics are easily identified.

Cost: Paid by the Libraries annually.

——————————

Database of the Week comes to you from the Management & Economics Library (MEL). Our intent is to give you a brief introduction to a database that you may not know.  If you would like more information about this database, or if you would like a demonstration of it for a class, contact kranlib@purdue.edu.  Database of the Week is archived  at https://blogs.lib.purdue.edu/news/category/MGMT/.  For more Purdue Libraries news, follow us on Twitter (@PurdueLibraries).