Management 489

Public companies must all file some certain financial reports every year with the SEC. 

• 10-K is the official annual report, with fully-audited financials
• 10-Q is the quarterly report, non-audited financials
• 8-K is other unscheduled reports that inform investors about significant changes

Search for these using the SEC's EDGAR search, linked below. 

The Letter to Shareholders (sometimes also called the Annual Report) is a highly-polished, slick version of their annual report that many companies produce. Find these just via Google -- [company name] letter to shareholders.

If your company is private, the financial research is considerably harder. Private companies do not have to release any financial information. 
The following databases are good resources for researching private companies. 

Use the following search strategy to obtain journal articles containing company analyses: 

After typing in your search terms, use the database filters to limit your search to Scholarly Journals, or possibly Dissertations or Trade Journals. These will provide deeper analyses than news articles.

If you get too many articles, try the following strategies:

• Use “phrase searching”
• Add more key words to get fewer results

If you get too few results, try the following strategies:

• Truncation to find all possible endings of a root word – e.g., profit* searches profit, profits, profitability… -- to get more results
• Use fewer words to get more results