The preeminent guide to financial data sources, organized by financial topic / instrument, created by Bobray Bordelon at Princeton's Firestone Library. Note that NYU does not necessarily subscribe to all these sources. Their corporate identity unique identifier matching guide may also be of interest.
A quick comparison of Bloomberg, Datastream, Factset, CRSP (from WRDS), and Global Financial Data created by Stanford Graduate School of Business' Library.
This Data Services workshop (including slide deck and worksheet) provides overarching strategies for finding data sources, and focuses on inductive thinking about data: who provides it, who is responsible for gathering it, and who has an incentive to release it?
Searching the Scholarly Literature
Extremely useful insights about where to find and how to manipulate financial data can be gleaned from the scholarly literature. Try searching the below databases for the topic you're exploring and the name of the dataset(s) you're examining. Google Scholar is the best place to begin, as it has the most advanced relevancy search algorithms.
Google Scholar is a search engine for scholarly literature across all disciplines. It's smart discovery algorithms make it easy to surface academic research on your topic, making it a complement to NYU's other scholarly databases. Scholar links into many of our NYU library subscriptions to deliver full text access. Learn how to set up NYU full text access in our Google Scholar guide.
ABI/INFORM features full-text journals, dissertations, working papers, key business, and economics periodicals. Researchers can locate country- and industry-focused reports, and its international focus provides a picture of companies and business trends around the world.
Business Source Complete is a full text database of articles from popular, scholarly, and trade publications. Subjects covered include management, economics, finance, accounting, international business. Dates of coverage: 1886 to present.
EconLit is published by the American Economic Association and indexes and abstracts a wide range of economics-related literature. An expanded version of the Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) indexes of journals, books, and dissertations, EconLit covers both economic theory and application. Coverage dates: 1969 to present.
Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is composed of a number of specialized research networks in the social sciences. Topics covered by networks include accounting, economics, financial economics, legal scholarship, and management (including negotiation and marketing). The SSRN eLibrary consists of abstracts of scholarly working papers and forthcoming papers and an electronic paper collection of downloadable full text documents in pdf format.
In order to subscribe to the NYU network one must create an account with their NYU email address. Please note that when accessing through off-site connection you may encounter a login screen which indicates you can 'login anonymously.' If you reach this choose to login anonymously and you will be granted access.
