The Corporate Librarian

A belated posting of a resource, sent on from John Ryan of ResearchBuy. ResearchBuy, from their website, looks to be an aggregator of others’ market research as well as a provider of custom research. Haven’t used them, so I can’t comment on the quality of their reports or the selection (in terms of geographic markets, industries, publishers).

However, what John wanted to publicize was their MarketWikis product, which collects free market research and allows users to add pages to their implementation of MediaWiki. Their inclusion policy notes that only English-language, freely-reusable reports which are available without logging into a website or which are owned by the contributor are allowed to be listed.

Clicking on a random page (Adhesives Market Research), I see that the sources listed for the industry overview are the Adhesive and Sealant Council, Inc., Answers.com, the US Census Bureau and Wikipedia. There’s a brief history of adhesives, discussion of market structure, some definitions of terms, high-level market metrics (size, adhesive market split by industry, leading geographic markets), listing of industry players with the most recent discussion being from 2002. a few paragraphs on recent trends and developments. The article is focused somewhat on the U.S., but no indication of this is given in the page title. From skimming quickly through various other articles, they tend to cover their industries on a very high-level global basis.

The Wealth Management page is rather more interesting, drawing on unspecified research from Boston Consulting Group, Cap Gemini, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs and UBS. I assume the Cap Gemini and Merrill Lynch references are to the annual World Wealth Report - it would be nice to see actual citations to the original documents. Lots of statistics on this page.

From looking at the Help: Contribute page, ResearchBuy does have editors reviewing contributions, and there are contributions besides those from ResearchBuy, and the Editing page does warn against speculation as opposed to posting facts. Contributors’ IP addresses are hidden, which makes me wonder exactly how the credibility (or lack of same) of a given author is established. Looking at the last 500 edits to the listing of research in the last 30 days, they’re all by John. The same trend holds true when I go looking at the history of random pages. So I wonder how many contributors there are currently - the Help: Contribute page states “We’ve already had users from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Europe, Turkey, Malaysia, Thailand, China, Canada, the UK and the US covering just about every major process and industry.”

The appeal seems to be: if you need an extremely basic global overview of an industry, or if you’re looking for charts, graphics and tables to use in your document, you’ll want to check this out. I’m skeptical, but we’ll see.