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The 10 Best Free Business Research Sites: A Call for Nominations

6/15/2015

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Good afternoon readers of Thinking Aloud,

I'd like to invite all business researchers, vendors, publishers and anyone with an interest in or experience with creating or using high quality but free digital business research resources to submit up to three nominees for our first in an annual "Best of the Best of the Business Web" competition. Up to 20 finalists will be announced in September and the names of the winners will be announced during the Internet Librarian conference this October in Monterey, CA

To be eligible for nomination, submitted resources must meet the following criteria:

1. The site/source/platform must be primarily be a research resource
2. The primary target audience of the source must be for persons conducting business oriented research, broadly defined* (see definition below)
3. There must be a method to formally interrogate the resource either via conducting a keyword or meta search, or an effective browsing method, or both
4. It must be free to use (requiring registration is acceptable; availability of a premium fee-based version is acceptable as well)
5. The creator/producer of the site must be willing to respond to follow up questions for the purpose of obtaining detailed information on the resource

Finalists will be scored and judged via a quantitative method, based on the following criteria:

* Uniqueness and value of data for business research, especially compared to other free resources
* Depth of coverage (e.g. size of database, archive, breadth) and level of detail provided
* Credibility of original source data
* Ease of use: intuitive interface, simple navigation, clear search/browse process
* Sophistication of search/browse method for conducting powerful and precision research
* Timeliness and update frequency
* Integration of special value added features such as an analytics function

The winning entries will be chosen via a qualitative method by a team of 3 information experts who will run sample searches for each of the finalists.

To submit an entry, please email the following information to robertberkman@gmail.com with the phrase "Top Resource Nomination" in the heading

1. Name of Source and URL
2. Name of Publisher/Creator with contact name and phone and/or email
3. Date resource launched
4. A succinct description (150 word maximum) explaining what the resource offers and its unique or special value to business researchers

Nominations close on July 30 2015. Feel free to post any questions on this competition here on this thread, or email me directly.

* Business research, as defined for this purpose, will encompass any professional and substantive research with the goal of locating data, information, and knowledge on companies, industries, products, new technologies, global business processes, scholarly business topics, established or emerging markets, demographics, consumer trends, reference, business news, regulatory information, patents, trademarks, development/fund raising and other related areas of interest to business information professionals. [If there is a question as to whether a particular resource fits this criteria, please email me at robertberkman@gmail.com]

Good luck to all who enter!
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Robert Berkman, robertberkman@gmail.com
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