LibGuides: Company Research: Executives

Sources

Generally, information about the top management and the Board of Directors appears in the SEC filings and is available in many databases.

For private company executives check Mergent Online and/or PrivCo and search the news sources.

Professional social networking sites may also be a source, e.g.LinkedIn or Plaxo.

Who's who in a company

Use the databases listed below to find information about executives in a specific compny.

Mergent Online This link opens in a new window
Sources include:

Fundamental data on over 50,000 global publicly traded companies
Annual reports for over 300,000 companies worldwide
Coverage on over 1,000,000 domestic and international private companies
Industry reports covering North America, Asia Pacific, Europe and Latin America
Executive biographies on over 200,000 confirmed corporate executives, updated daily
Earnings estimates from Thomson First Call
Microsoft Excel plug-in for data modeling and analysis
Equity research reports with analyst recommendations covering over 4,000 large-cap and mid-cap companies
Institutional holdings and insider transaction data, updated daily
Up to 30 years of adjusted and unadjusted end-of-day equity pricing data
Historical information on security pricing dating back to 1925

Mergent Online offers detailed insight into company and industry research.

Coverage: Current

Marketline Advantage
Company Profiles section. Each Profile lists the company's key executives with brief biographies.

PrivCo This link opens in a new window
Business and financial data on major, non-publicly traded corporations, including family-owned, private equity-owned, venture-backed, and international unlisted companies.

Use PrivCo to find information on private investors, private M&A deals, and venture capital funding rounds. The advanced search feature allows you to identify companies and investors by industry, size, location, and more, and information can be exported to Excel.Over 220,000 private companies are included in the database.

Articles and News

Business Source Complete This link opens in a new window
Provides full text access for more than 1,100 peer-reviewed business publications. Additional full text, non-journal content includes financial data, books, monographs, major reference works, book digests, conference proceedings, case studies, investment research reports, industry reports, market research reports, country reports, company profiles, SWOT analyses and more.

Covers accounting, banking, finance and economics, management, marketing, MIS, POM, and other business topics.
Coverage: 1886-present
ABI/Inform Collection This link opens in a new window
Full text for more nearly 4,000 business journals, and citations with abstracts to 1,000 more business titles.

Coverage: Full text 1991-present | Indexing 1905-present

Biographical Information

Company Web Site
Most company websites contain information about their key executives.

Gale in Context: Biography This link opens in a new window
Gale in Context combines biographies with related full-text articles from magazines and newspapers, thousands of images, and links to vetted websites.

A comprehensive database of biographical information on over 380,000 people from throughout history, around the world, and across all disciplines and subject areas. Search for people---both current and historic from all eras and fields of endeavor---based on name, occupation, nationality, ethnicity, birth/death dates and places, or gender, as well as keyword and full text.
Coverage: Current and retrospective

Off the beaten path

Sometimes items can be found in an executive's hometown newpaper. Try both the newspaper where the executive grew up and where the executive currently resides. Another strategy is to go to the websites of the educational institutions that an executive attended and search there. Many universities publish stories on their "successes".

Library Guides

Company Research: Executives

Coordinator of Access & Public Services