Industry reports can give you an idea of what is going on in an industry. Some of the things you can do with the information you get from them is determine trends and identify the type of competition in the industry. Below is a list of University Libraries' subscription databases that provide profiles and overviews for a wide range of industries.
MarketLine Industry Profiles include an analysis of the five forces that affect an industry. These reports can be found in Business Source Complete.
When conducting small business research, most of the time you will not be able to find financial data about your competitors because they are privately held. Consequently, you can use industry financial benchmarks. The sources on this page can help you find these.
When doing business research, it is useful to obtain the NAICS codes and SIC codes.
The links below will help you find the codes for specific types of industries. You can also find NAICS and SIC codes by looking at the industry information for a company in a database like Mergent Intellect.
It is important to know these codes in order to retrieve statistical information produced by the Census as well as search certain databases by these codes. For instance you can use it to find industry overviews in databases like First Research and IBISWorld, and identify companies in an industry with a database like Reference Solutions or Mergent Intellect.