Library Transcripts

Video Link: https://youtu.be/PsDB6wfSD-w

 

Introduction to Business & IT Statistics Research

 

Begin Transcript

 

Narration:

 

 

>> AUDREY BUTLETT-SWENSON:  Good afternoon everybody, or good morning, depending on your time zone. Thank you so much for taking time today to attend this webinar about Introduction to Business and IT Statistics Research. I wanted to introduce myself and say hi, because I know we don't get to do a lot of face-to-face. I am Audrey Butlett-Swenson, and I am the Liaison Librarian to the College of Management and Technology, so you might have seen my face if you're a residency student, if you have gone to residencies. Or, if you have been of the Business and Management or IT page in the library, my picture is in there, too. I won't have video on the whole time. It's just that quick hello.

 

Just a couple of items here, just know that the webinar will be recorded. Anybody who registered, regardless of whether -- if you had a buddy who registered but didn't show up, just know that they also get a recording, you will get a follow-up email from us in the next 24 to 48 hours with a link or an attachment of the recording.

 

Two of the guides we're going to be looking at in the library will be linked in the follow-up email today. You don't have to worry about trying to find them and bookmark them today. Just know that they will be in the follow-up email. Otherwise, I mean, you could search the library and they should be pretty easy to pop up. Just know they will be sent out, so don't stress out too much to get to the right page, do I need to bookmark it right now? You will get a follow-up with that information.

 

One last thing, I was going to go through and do a little prepping before my webinar which I have done numerous times before, and realized that some of my favorite government website resources have changed or have gone bye-bye. We are going to do a kind of impromptu work through today, so you might get a little bit of sneak peek on me getting used to some of that content, too. Hopefully we are still able to find some of the really nitty-gritty stuff, and of course the content we are going to go through in the actual library will be the same.

 

When I am going through this webinar, please note, if you have a question along the way, put it in the questions box. If you need me to repeat something, if you need me to slow down, if you need me to clarify something, please do put that it the questions box. Totally not a problem. The only questions I might not get to are if they are not super related to this webinar or if they are really in-depth and might take 10 to 15 minutes to do a response. We only have an hour today. Or if it is not, again, super relevant to the topic today, I can always follow-up directly. And I will do that to whatever email address you used to register for the webinar, today.

 

I will go ahead and pull myself out of the video. Again, thank you for coming to the Introduction to Business and IT Statistics Research webinar today. I will move on to our agenda.

 

We are going to be going through library resources and actually, that will probably be one of the last things we go to. But it will be something we covered today, what to be aware of in library statistic resources. And, government statistics and search tips. I know search tips are going to go and cover those sections. We will be doing a certain business database, so you can figure out how to look for different data and statistics, and in a general database, if you're trying to find an article that’s talking about, the data or statistic point. Search tips for government content, and of course, we have one stats database that we will be talking about today. Maybe some of you have heard of it, but it is called SAGE stats. And we will go in there and play around little bit.

 

I'm not going to talk superfast, but we might have some time at the end if anyone has questions. Otherwise, I would let you guys go about your day because I know people are probably pretty busy. Hopefully, all of you are safe and healthy and I hope you stay that way. Again, during the presentation, if you have questions, please put them down in the questions box. I am going to pop out of that. I've got my little handy dandy note box here, but I don't think I will need it right away.

 

Before I dig into any content, I just want to welcome you to the library homepage. Hopefully many of you have already been here. If you need help with anything, if you're looking for full text, know that you can contact us at Ask a Librarian in the upper right-hand corner. We have different ways that you can contact us -- email, chat, voicemail. If you're a doctoral student, you can make an appointment with me. And it does not have to be me. If you aren't in the college of management technology, you could grab onto the college here and find your program liaison. But if you are in my college but maybe your research focuses on education, you could always make an appointment with an education librarian, too. Don't hesitate to do that. You don't have to stay within an area. But I want to point that out before we dig into any actual content.

 

The first thing I want to show you in the library is our data and statistics page. I can walk through how to get to this page, but I did link in the follow-up email with you guys. So I'm not going to worry about trying to find it the webpage, because we have to go through Start your Research. If anybody wants me to I can, but I promise, promise, promise it will be in the follow-up email tomorrow.

 

Some of this will be we covered today. As I said earlier, some of my favorite resources have died. They are still linked on this webpage, which I will update later today once the webinar is over. For the things we're talking about today, the content in here is still relevant.

 

One of the things that I point out when we're talking about statistics and data is to differentiate between data sets and then just looking at data and statistics. Data sets is broad data or data that you're going to end up using for your own research in your own, totally separate from just looking government statistics when looking for statistics articles. And actually that's not entirely true. Some government pages will have data sets. But I just want to point out that we're not going to talk about data sets so much today. But if you have questions about looking for data sets, there is information on here. ORDS has a database called ICSPR that is linked on this page. So if you want to go look at that database, you certainly can. It is just controlled by the Office of Research and Doctoral Services and if you need help looking for data sets in that research base, you can email them. If you click on this, it will take you to their page and you can find their contact information. But again, I’m not going to really talk about data sets, because that is more of their wheelhouse. But I can give you some guidance.

 

Looks like there is a question in there about data sets, and I promise I will follow-up with you one-on-one and I would give you some suggestions and I will give you a link to who to reach out to or who to email so you can get help with that. Or, you can make an appointment with me, and we can work it out that way, too. There's a couple different places we can look at, especially looking for data sets. But for right now we are not going to super focus on that.

 

We're going to be doing, if you are a DBA student, looking a problem statement, try to find it in statistics for your problem statement, that is more what we will be working on today, that focus. Not so much on the data sets. But again, the student who put that in the questions box, I will reach out to you, I will give you some ideas and suggestions on where to go for that.

 

The next section we have here is statistics and data by topic. Here is a section I was talking about. We have a bunch of the more popular US government departments' websites listed here. My absolute favorite resource that they had was American FactFinder, and they just retired it today. It was excellent timing on my behalf. [LAUGHS] I thought I had until later the summer. I was wrong. But I did find their alternative, which I will replace this with. They have something called data.gov, and it has some of the same, actuality. We will go over that today.

 

I want to point out this page because, if you're researching something that is kind of broad that might cover a couple different topics, each one of our programs has a bunch of links that are going to be helpful for looking at data and statistics and in [indiscernible] health sciences data sets. But if you're not sure which one to dig into, you can certainly search on this top search bar. What this top search bar does is it is actually going to search every single link that is on this page. If you are like, I don't know if I should look in the U.S. Census for this or, [indiscernible] depending on what you're researching. If you don't know which one to start with, you can come in here and just type in topic.

 

For this search, we're probably going to get a lot from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, because it's talking about turnover. But it will take you to a bunch of different pages through the BLS, so you can kind of get an idea of which section to dig into to get answers or information regarding what you are hoping to find. So that is what that top search bar is. We recognize that searching through websites is time-consuming and it's not always clear where you should start, how things are indexed. So this top search bar is there to help you.

 

Again, if you’re unclear on digging through things in different government websites or you're trying to figure out which website might be best, you can come here. Later in the webinar we will be talking about doing a general Google search, run a demo for that. Or of course, you can email us or make an appointment and we can certainly talk with you one-on-one.

 

Before I even take into that next section, searching for statistics and articles, which is something that we will demo after we go through the actual government websites, is just know that the government departments and organizations, most of the time they are tracking the what for the data and not the why. The example I use pretty often is they are going to track business closure, but they are not going to tell you why they closed. They are just going to say in 2017, there were 30,000 retail stores in this Metro area, and by the end of the year there was 29,000. But they're not going to tell you why those 1000 businesses closed. There's not a lot of why. It's just that link data.

 

That's something to think about when you're searching through government websites is, am I looking for a what or for a why? When you're looking for the why, peer-reviewed articles are going to be your friend.

 

You can still search the government websites for the why, it just might be hard to find or it might not be there. I will show you what I'm talking about a little further down.

 

Let's go into this next section, we're going to search for statistics articles. This is something we will cover later, this is a little bit broad, obviously this is focused on education. But you can certainly search for statistics and data in articles. I will go through some keywords that I tend to use. But I think for business, a lot of times, the questions that students have is the cost, the profit, closure, turnover, percentage -- the terms that you're really focusing on that are going to help you find those articles you're actually discussing those data points. That is something I will go back to.

 

But I just wanted to go over what this guide is and explain that some of this content, if you need to come back to it after this webinar, it is here for you. If anybody has questions about this guide, let me know.

 

We are going to pop into the census website, just because most of the content we're going to talk about today is linked in there. Let me just make sure I haven't missed anything on questions. Okay. Excellent.

 

I have opened up the census page which was linked here in the... data by topic here, U.S. Census is at the top and I think US Census Bureau is linked in most of the areas, below. Again, I apologize, this is not going to be as clean as I would have liked, just because they did move some stuff around. But I want to show you a few different areas you can go in the U.S. Census to find some specific content.

 

They do have a browse by topic section, so depending on what you're researching, you can come in here and go to that. For demoing today, business and economy is going to be our friend.

 

They kind of have it, some of these are going to be tables that are covering different areas. The other thing to keep an eye out is some of this stuff is only collected certain years, some it might not be as young as you are hoping.

 

If you are looking for... this is state and statistics here, business and workforce dynamics, this isn't quite it. But if you are looking for how employment works with different businesses, this would be a great place to go. They have a lot of different content linked within here. If you want to learn more about it, it's linked here on the left-hand side. So I don't think I want to click on the US. I think the last thing I want to do, let me just make sure... most of the stuff I wanted to go under is the survey programs. But I think because small business is a very popular topic -- I have one in four students talking to me about small business or nonprofit -- let's click on that section for today. You can come here and look at the Small Business section, or you can go to the SBA website, Small Business Association's website. I don't think the SBA has their data. It's not as publicly easy to find as it is here. So you can come in here and do a get to know your customers, click on that. They will give you some resources you can look at.

 

There is my buddy, FactFinder, which has gone bye-bye. You don't know how sad I am about that. I really loved that resource. But the one I do like is Start your Planning. And you can do it by the Small Business edition or the Regional. Either one is fine. I will just demo this left one for you. I think this is pretty cool.

 

Every once in a while, I have a student who they want to survey certain businesses within a certain ZIP Code. This is a great resource to do that in. You're going to come in here and click on your area. We will just say gas stations. Then, you enter in, I would just use Minneapolis, because that's where I live. We have to move something out of the way to make this work because I can't see the homepage. Great. Then we are going to click on Create Report.

 

Then we will scroll down and they give you a lot of different information that you could pull from -- socioeconomic, demographics, housing, business owner information…lots of cool stuff. The other thing that was go to a map, which I really like, too, because it reminds you of where all these businesses are where we’re looking at. My ZIP Code that I put in here is that Minneapolis. Here it is [indiscernible] part, it will show you where it's at and it gives you some of the information we were discussing, too.

 

That's pretty cool. You can change the map variables to change your industry from here. That Small Business Search, it's a really cool resource that they have. Again, when I search through the SBA website, I have a harder time finding content. I will show you a shortcut for that later in the webinar.

 

So the next section I wanted to show you is the Explore Data. I don't think they have, they reindexed [indiscernible] here. So you have a couple different options to explore data main or look at data tools and apps. If you click on Explore Data Main, it's going to give you the option to do a full search, like what are you looking for? What are you hoping to find?

 

They do have a link to data.census.gov. This is going to be my new buddy. I was talking about American FactFinder, and this is a very similar set up. I just, I'm not as sure about the functionality of it, yet, because I haven't spent as much time playing with it. But you can come in here and search. I actually suggest doing advanced search. What this does is it kind of walks you through guided search of whatever you're hoping to find. If you click on topics, you can look at business and economy, narrow it down further if you would like to. We can click on small business and then you could say small business or you could look at establishments. You can look at single and multiunit firms. Or just click small business. Then if you were looking for a geographic location, if you are looking at a region, if you just want to do Northeast, the West, the South. If you're looking by state, you could pick a specific state. We will click on Arizona, because it's near the top. Then if you had specific years you’re hoping to find -- again, earlier, like I said, not all data is going to be available for the newest year, so 2016 - 2017, if you're planning to graduate, just give yourselves a little buffer here. So, we got 2017. We could do by survey. I am not going to do that because I don't want it to totally kill our search.

 

If you want to come in here and narrow by codes, we'll talk about NAICS codes in a little bit. I don't mess with these quite as much, but I am sure there's search options for them, built into search options for them. Maybe some of you have heard of NAICS codes, maybe some of you have not. Many times you will see and NAPCS codes with them. North American Industry Classification System, think that is what that stands for. Yes. Good. We have so many acronyms in this world.

 

What this does is the US government -- [indiscernible] between Canada and Mexico and US, but I would have to go out and check -- they have indexed all the industries and some industries by specific code. If you can figure out what your code is, you can search by that, especially if you're looking a very specific industry. And we will go over that, but we have a pretty good set of filters set it right now, and it will show you here at the bottom.

 

Small business, Arizona, 2017. Pretty broad. But hopefully that will give us -- sorry, somebody was hoping I would pick Connecticut. But I did not see that fast enough, I apologize. But we can certainly rerun it, go back and change the state.  But it gives you the information that we can sift through. It will show you all the different tables if you want to. I am not going to click on that. It gives you a map. Sub content. And, any subsequent pages it might be talking about what you're hoping to find.

 

I think that's pretty cool. If you click on tables, here are all your tables on the left-hand side. If you just want to look at your map, great. Then here are the pages that they have. There's a lot of different ways to look at this. I am going to head back to that main page. We will do a Connecticut search for that student. Hopefully, it lets me go back and adjust that. We will take Arizona out and put Connecticut search. Great. We're looking at small business in Connecticut in 2017. We've got all sorts of stuff here. Partnerships, government, nonprofits. It looks like a lot of sub tables that we can look at. Looking at it by establishment size, oops, that's what I get for clicking around, right? There's a lot of different ways you can sort that. Just know that's an option.

 

This has been my replacement for American FactFinder this morning. You will see that was a very popular question, “When will American FactFinder go away?” I think people really did love, love, love that resource. Honestly, it's decent the way that they set this up.

 

While we're in here, let's take a look at those codes. Because I think that will kind of feed into the next topic. Then we will go into the other data sections that they have that I think will be useful for you guys. So I am going back to that code section then talk about the NAICS codes. They kind of have the broader NAICS codes listed here.

 

Bummer, I thought they would for sure let us do a search for a specific NAICS code. No, they did not. Lame! [LAUGHS] Sorry, guys. I thought they would for sure let me do that. It is just going to search all of them. That's too bad. American FactFinder let you search by your exact NAICS code. What I will do is I will skip that for now, but I will show you what NAICS code is because we can use this code in the databases, as well, when you're searching for articles.

 

I already have this page open, North American Industry Classification System. It's a lot of words for a simple way of saying we have given unique identification numbers to industry codes or industry areas.

 

If we were looking at... that's funny, I had a student while back who was researching beauty salons. So I'm going to borrow that topic and search by that particular term. Then if you find the one you're looking for, we've got beauty salon construction, probably not what we want unless you are looking at that specifically, but beauty salon is probably what we're hoping to find. If you click on that, it will narrow it down even further.

 

So maybe you want to focus on barbershops or places that have estheticians. What you notice here is all the NAICS codes are the same. A lot of times when you come in here, some of these subtopics will have a separate NAICS code that falls beneath the main one. Let me say retail, since that is very broad. You will see under retail we have a ton of different options here. Let's do webtailers. [sounds like] Hopefully this is a better example. It was last year or the last previous year. You will see the old NAICS has previous versions. Don't worry about the old [indiscernible] it looks like they are giving the uniform NAICS web code. We will come back to that and I will show you how we can use that in the databases. Maybe we will find a few other places in the U.S. Census website that will give us a reason to use it.

 

I am going to head back... we are going to go all the way back to the general U.S. Census website. The next section I want to show you here is a survey of programs.

 

Let me just make sure [indiscernible] county. The ones that I went through that I think are probably the most relevant are going to be the annual business survey, county business patterns and the statistics for US businesses. But I think some of these might still be very relevant to you, depending what your research is. Let's start with the annual business survey. If you just want to look at their data here, they always have news underneath here related to whatever topic they've got with their survey that they released. Click on through that.

 

They have tables here. Oops, I did not mean to [indiscernible] that. Well, maybe they will let us look at their interface. Nope. Like I said, they really threw me through a tizzy this morning.

 

So let's take a look at characteristic of businesses. Fun. [LAUGHS] Guys, just so you know, this happens to us all the time. I spent so much time looking... oh my gosh. I guess we're not looking through their data yet, since it is not available. But in theory, most of it should be available.

 

Let's go back [indiscernible] county business patterns. Hopefully in the next year they will have the data available or maybe, it's just getting analyzed, now. Great.

 

So, you will notice there are tables of variation and data sets. I’m not going to go into the data sets, but I will click on the CBP tables. And, you can come through here and go by date, and I will give you information regarding the county business patterns. I don't think they're going to give you the option to narrow it down by ZIP Code. Let's see if we have older content here that we can click on.

 

Great.

 

So, they will let you organize this by field here. You can download it. I'm sure you can shift more filters on here. Look at geography if you want to. A lot of these should be interactive and a lot of them you should be able to download as a table. It just depends on what you have open. So they have the download option here, but if you wanted to look at these specifically, you could say click on that one, download, check it out.

 

Then, let's do the Statistics of US Businesses. Great. Again, tables and data sets. I swear these used to have a search engine. Again, I am [indiscernible] that I'm not getting the same content. At least, there are actual data tables that you can look at. It looks like they're organized by NAICS code or industry or you can look at geographic locations. Let's click on one of them. Some of these are huge, really, really big, and some are smaller. The ones that are usually organized by overarching industries, like, we would have a big one for agriculture. That is one section. Then, retail. Then maybe food and [indiscernible]. So there would only be six. But this looks like it's narrowed down by every single NAICS code that is out there. So this is a pretty big data table to look through. It is going to tell you the number of establishments, employment, the end will payroll. Honestly, if you're trying to find the sub information based on a geographic location that the census, what was it, data census.gov, that is really your best bet because it's going to pull it together for you in one table. But you can look at this by subtopic that they have already pulled together for you under surveys and programs.

 

I’m not going to click on all of these, but just know that you can come in here and review all of the surveys that they have done. On another note here, you can do the same thing with, if you look at Data Tools and Apps, they will show you all the different resources that they have where you can pull together information based off of what they have had. Maybe this is what I was looking at before is the census builder. Yes, it is. The census business builder. Actually, this is what we already demoed, Small Business. I am not going to go into that again. But there are several different ways to find the same thing, apparently. Again, I apologize, this is not as clean as I was hoping to go. Thanks for sticking with me.

 

The other thing I'd like to point out, feel free to dig through these. I am not going to go through all of them, because not all of them are pertinent to business and management. There are some of the [indiscernible] in here if you want to do see the information the government is tracking.

 

The other thing I like to look at is this Quick Facts. It will kind of let you narrow it down by different, overarching topics. If we click on businesses, you can come in here and just kind of get more quick, overarching information. Again, you can change this. Do more in-depth searching if you want to. I think that is another cool interactive search section here. Another one we can play with is DataFerret, I haven't played with that as much, just because I need at the rights for my computer and as far as this being a work computer, I don't want to add it in. But it looks like it can be a pretty cool resource if anyone is interested in looking at it.

 

I don't see any questions so far, so we will move out of the U.S. Census website. Again, I will update this page and replace the American FactFinder link in here with the datacensus.gov page so it will be there for you. Again, this page will be sent out to you after the webinar, and you can just click on it directly from the email link that I sent out.

 

Let's move on to... you know, we will come back to that. I was going to walk you through the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but I think I will use that as an example when we do a Google search.

 

In the library, I like to highlight this database just because it's one of my favorites. If you go to databases A through Z, that actually [indiscernible] on this page at the very bottom. It's here, as well. You can find this link at the bottom of the page I'm going to send out to you when you can go to the databases A to Z page. You click on S. We are going to go to a database, SAGE Stats. The nice thing about SAGE Stats is that it does not change like the government websites, but it is pulling the same content, or similar content, from government websites.

 

I should say, if there is anybody who is researching data specifics outside the United States, so if you're looking at for Nigeria, if you are in Europe somewhere, if you are in China, we will talk about trying to find government data do their websites, as well. But just know most of the resources we have linked in the library are going to be US based. But that doesn't mean we can't help you to try some through whatever country you're trying to research there. My friend SAGE stats here, the nice thing you can do here is you can either browse by topic, search by topic, search by location. You can search by whatever your topic is, although I would keep it broad. If you were just looking at turnover, you can just type in turnover -- and some of these are probably not going to be super pertinent since it looks like we're looking at [indiscernible] here. But you can come in here and narrow down your search and hopefully it will find what you're looking for.

 

If we are going to try to figure it out from browsing, I would go under employment and labor. And from here you will notice they have the NAICS listing here, as well. Sure we come with the NAICS codes and search directly. But you will notice there are a lot of limiters on the left-hand side, say we wanted to find something more recent than 1979, we could change the date range. If there was a specific area -- city, county, metro area, state -- is it going to let me do that? It is not. I thought for sure that would let me do that. Okay. Doesn't look like it. I don't know what's going on there.

 

All right, then you come down here and narrow by industry, we are going to cite [indiscernible] Enterprises and that narrows it down to 1. It has that same functionality that the datacensus.gov page has, where you kind of narrow down your filters to find what you're looking for. Then you will click on it and get your data series related to what we were looking here, employment labor. Don't remember the other filters we click on. But it will show you an edge active map. You can hover over the different sections. Median number of large management companies and enterprises, employees with [indiscernible], number of locations with data. Then you have a legend here with information. So you can look at it that way. You can look at it by table and you can look at it by chart.

 

One of the nicest things about SAGE Stats is it is always going to tell you where they got the information upfront. If you click on Source, it will tell you they got the information from U.S. Census, what year, they got from the County Business Patterns that was not letting me pull data. Not a problem, it will just always show you where they are getting their information from.

 

That's important because, so, some government reports, sometimes you will notice that they are actually citing proprietary market report like Gartner’s or Gallup . The reason they are doing that is they don't want to take the energy to do that themselves. So they will just use a proprietary market report and cite that information.

 

That's tricky, because that is not information that you're going to be able to use, as far as your problem statement. Beyond that, I would ask your faculty. But just know that that is not going to work for your problem statement if you are a DBA student. Hopefully there are not any questions about that.

 

About location, again you can come in here and go by state, county, metro and city. Then, you can narrow it down by, let's say Colorado…and for some reason that does not work. So that's go in and pick on county. A lot of this is probably going to come from the US Census Bureau. It is condensed in a way that is easier to sort through, at least I think it is. That way you're not going to have to dig through the government websites as much. Sage Stats is really great.

 

We also have an advanced search function that if you're not sure what you're typing, you can start with looking through limiters. If you're looking through the age demographic, data type, if you're looking at gender, looking at measurement, we've got a lot of different measurements here. So that is SAGE Stats.

 

I don't see any questions about SAGE Stats, so hopefully you like it as much as I do, or once you start playing with it you will like it is much as I do. SAGE gives us four different databases and I love them all. I think their content is wonderful. So if you have a chance to look at our other SAGE databases, I really suggest that you do, because they're outstanding.

 

Let's do a search in one of our databases, I am going to go through the business and management area but just know if you're searching outside of them, if you're looking at health statistics and data related to maybe turnover, you can look in our health sciences databases or nursing or if there is something else outside of our area, please don't hesitate to use us other areas, that is what they are there for. But I'm just going to pick on business and management today.

 

The next thing I'm going to do is click on business management databases and click on this is Business Source Complete. So I think the number one, trickiest thing  about researching for data statistic research and articles is not that content isn't always  searchable, the content in the article is not always going to be what the database is searching through. So you kind of have to focus on what the author might be discussing in the author abstract. And, I will show you exactly what we are talking about. We are going to look at turnover, that is my handy-dandy go-to topic.

 

Then, something that students might be researching is what is the cost of turnover in a certain industry? What is the price? What is the percentage of turnover in this industry? What I tell the students is don't try to search by a dollar amount. Don't use special symbols. Special symbols are not going to work. I can't put a $ in here, it is not going to work. Same thing for Google Scholar, it really has a hard time with special symbols. Don't think about it as what I might have typed in there, think about it as a topic. You can say dollars or millions. But just keep in mind if you type in millions, that could be talking about employees or something like that. But just think about it is how it would be described. Is it going to be described as a percentage or as a cost? Is it going to be described as a profit? Try to use words that are going to be used to describe in regards to the topic that you're researching.

 

The next thing you want to do is click on peer-reviewed scholarly journals. Again, if you're not a DBI student, DIT student, PhD, doctoral student in general, you don't have to click on peer-reviewed scholarly journals if it is not a requirement. If the article you're hoping to find is not required to be peer-reviewed, you don't have to have that checked. But I'm using an example for other students. But just know you don't have to click that unless it is required. I'm going to go ahead and hit search.

 

So, we've got about 1300. If we wanted to narrow this down even further, like this one is perfect. Field Evidence and Implications for Employee Turnover and Firm Profits. Hopefully, this article is going to be talking about the direct correlation between employee turnover and firm profits. Then hopefully, we will find something in this article that discusses a number, a firm value, that we can talk about in problem statement. If we wanted to narrow this down a little further, we could change this to maybe abstract or author-supplied abstract. What this is is that little blurb when you click on the title. It will show you what the author has described the article is discussing. I am going to go ahead and hit search, again.

 

Then they wrote it down, in that bit. But I will show you exactly what I'm talking about. So let's click on this first title. You will see that profits and [indiscernible] I didn't put it in quotes, but it's just got profits in the abstract. It is unlikely the author is going to talk about the exact number in terms of profits or cost or employee turnover. It is unlikely they will put those data points in the abstract. So you have to do a broader search of the things you are hoping to find. Hopefully there are not any questions about that, but that is probably the easiest way to do it.

 

The other thing I'm going to show you, I'm going to go in the advanced search again. So if you wanted to come in here and look at employee labor and turnover and all this cost regarding specific industry code, you certainly can. They have all the NAICS code listed here, too. If you don't want to go back to the NAICS website and search for it there, it is listed. They even have the page link there, hopefully that's working. But you could come in here and find your NAICS code and search. These look pretty specific. I don't know how much we would find on employee turnover in shellfishing. [LAUGHS] I probably won't do that. But just know you could pick something that's pretty broad in what you want to search.

 

We could try web retailers, we might get zero, but I just want to show you how to do it. You come in here and paste your NAICS code and search. Oh, we got nine. Cool. There are nine articles that have been indexed with the NAICS code discussing web retailers and employee turnover and the cost percentage or dollars.

 

So again, you can certainly search...  [indiscernible] we might lose everything there. Yeah. If I was going to come in here and do a search that is this specific, I would try a broader NAICS code, something that is like general retail or a broader industry code, because when you get that specific, you might hit a wall. If I was going to do that beauty salon search, I probably wouldn't even bother putting in the dollar amount here, yet, until I can find out how many articles are discussing the employee turnover and labor within that industry and narrow it down from there.

 

Any questions about searching in the databases by topic and then narrowing down for data statistics or employment history? Anybody? We’ve still got about 15 minutes left. I know I have gone through quite a bit, and you have a lot of information to absorb in a short time. I just want to make sure you guys get what you need from it. Okay, cool. I am not seeing anything in that questions box.

 

The next thing I want to show you is a general Google search. We know there's a lot of government websites to go through, and I showed you this page, the stats and data page, where you can start from the top based on what we have in here. But if you feel like you need to go beyond that -- and sometimes you do, because you have a very specific topic -- again, I'm going to pick on my employee turnover example, just because it's my favorite go-to. You can search through government domains. You can do this by country or you can just do it, if you're in the US it is .gov. But if you're outside the US, it would be like uk.gov. Or if you're in Nigeria, it would be ng.gov. You can certainly search by different countries’ domains, and you can search for just a specific website domain, and I will show you exactly what I'm talking about. I’m going to put it employee turnover and then type in the word site, colon, then put in dot gov. [site:.gov]

 

What this is going to be is pull in any exact websites mentioning the phrase employee turnover. It might find some articles that there's available on a government website, it is going to pull some that looks like some state information here. You know what? If I put labor turnover, I was surprised that the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not pop up. But I think I would have had to have written in labor turnover and we would have gotten BLS. But just know you can certainly do a broad search and figure out which federal government websites have some content.

 

If you're starting to look through a state or county, you can certainly narrow this down. I'm going to pick on Texas, since they have popped into my results list here. Now I've got about 1800 results of Texas websites that talk about employee turnover. Now, if I had a subtopic that wanted to add, I can look at the data or statistics. Great. It looks like we have a state auditor’s page. We've got some information there. Looking for, [indiscernible] that the data or statistics will pop up as part of the results. So that is another way to search for relevant government websites to help you find the data and statistics that you're looking for.

 

Again, if you're really overwhelmed by the Census Bureau, you could just put in census.gov and look at that. All the pages, all the subpages on the census.gov page discussed employee turnover and statistics. If you have a big website like, that you can start to narrow it down.

 

So I’m going to pick on, because of our topic, I'm going to pick on the BLS, Bureau of Labor Statistics, because that is another big one.

 

I have 75 results here. I think if I change this, yeah, some of the big databases and some of the different government agencies will talk about employee turnover as labor turnover. So just keep that in mind. If you're kind of hitting a wall with whatever you're searching, the government entity or the databases might be describing it in a different way. If you see that there is another way or keywords they're describing, add it to your search. We could say labor turnover... I just saw one. We will just leave that. You can say labor turnover, employee turnover and that upped our results list here.

 

If you went into the BLS, which I am going to do that briefly because I want you guys... oh, they updated their page too. The one page I would suggest checking out, as they do have subjects -- which is nice, then you kind of know what subject to dig into if you're looking for national employment or job openings or turnover you can go directly there -- is Business Employment Dynamics, so that might be another one, just to figure out what the turnover is by industry. Then you can go here by tools, too. Honestly, let's look at the top picks, I'm curious to see what they did.

 

Oh, okay. So from here, and a lot of these will give you the option to do a limiter based on what you're asking for. If you're looking at employment rate, any other subtopics here, I'm going to click on retrieve data. A lot of them, some of these, as far as I remember, will let you narrow it down further. If you're looking for the workforce statistics on a specific industry or geographic area, they will let you do that. My guess is now that they have reindexed this website we can probably go under job openings and turnover and be able to find it this way.

 

They are really throwing me for a loop here. Everybody is redoing their content. These are the databases they usually have, so let’s click on one of them. Great.

 

This is what I was talking about as looking through limiters -- looking through industry, other sub limiters that you might be using, looking at geographic location. We will just say Quits. And we will say Total Nonfarm. It looks like we need to add first. It's not going to let me do that. It's fun. Nothing like doing this in front of a crowd. [LAUGHS] Oh, goodness. Let's try this again. And, get data. There we go.

 

So they build spreadsheets for us or you can download and look at based off whatever we limited. Most of them should have the option or you can start to add filters based on the data that they collected. It isn't always going to be perfect, and they're not going to generally tell you why there was such a big turnover in a specific industry. Like I said, it is the what and not the why.

 

That is a good question. Good. The international organizations are countries. That is a great question, because I did not do an example of that in the Google search.

 

If we were looking for, I am going to pick on Nigeria, you would find the domain name and what I would do for that is, I think Wikipedia has a really good list, country domain list. Great. So it should have, it will give you an explanation of the different domains that they have. So, .gov, which is general for the US. But if you were looking for a specific country, you would come down here and figure out which country you were hoping to focus on. I was focusing on Nigeria, just because we have some lovely Nigerian students and they are often researching their country. So, I help them find government sites or information from local websites, local agencies.

 

Let's go ahead and borrow Nigeria. So you would say ng.gov. I probably did not do the best search on that, so let's try to keep it little broader. Oh, geez. And, still not working.

 

Let's try the UK. No. Interesting. It's not UK. There it is. I just had them turned around. It will be gov dot whatever country. There we go. Finally got it. You would figure out what your domain country name is that at that dot gov. Or if you are looking to organizations [indiscernible] you're hoping to find, if you find you're interested and hoping to search further [sounds like], let's go back [indiscernible].

 

Great. I am trying to find one that might be helpful. I've got IRS top pension. I’m not sure what to choose here. But you could grab whatever website looks most relevant to you. Just like the ones you would do for the US government, you would just copy the domain name here and run the search. Then, if you had a topic you were interested in, say, turnover…and it is not letting me do that. That's fine. Just know you can still search through government domains outside the US. If you're having difficulties with that, please reach out through the library email or you can make an appointment with me one-on-one. Each government is going to have different ways of doing this, having different agency names, so it's not always clear, and it requires a little bit of extra research. We are absolutely happy to help you with that.

 

There's a question that asks if this is always accessible. I am not sure if that is in regards to the webinar, or something I was looking up?

 

Another question box and, “Which search website is the most recommended?” So if you were looking for government agencies that are talking about a specific topic, Google is fine. You could come in here and search and use the domain name and topic and try to find something that is relevant to you. I'm sure Bing or any other search engine on the web has something very, very similar you can narrow a search by domain. I just default to Google. But if there was something more specific than that, please do let me know and I can provide you with a better suggestion if I can.

 

All right guys, we've got three more minutes. Are there any more questions? If there is something I cannot answer in three more minutes, I will follow-up with you. For the student who asked me if this is accessible, I will get with you to get more context for that and [indiscernible].

 

All right everybody, thank you so much for attending today. After the webinar is over, there will be an option for completing a survey as far as how well I did today. Positive, critical feedback, both are great. Hopefully next time I will do this, I will be more equipped with the new website they have rolled out new search function data tools.

 

Thank you again for attending today. Please do provide me with feedback, good and bad. I want to do better next time. Hopefully, I will see you at another webinar, and keep an eye out for the recording in your email. Thanks so much, guys. I hope you have a great rest of your week.

 

 

End Transcript

 

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