Factiva international news database

Searching Factiva
To connect on or off campus

Factiva is an enormous international news and company data database. A huge variety of news sources in 23 languages, including cyrillic script, Chinese simplified and traditional scripts and Arabic are included.

  • Over 10000 international news sources are available.
  • 2300+ world newspapers. Highlights include, Financial Times, Economist, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Straits Times, South China Morning Post. Also expect to find Le Monde, Pravda, Tokyo Shibum, Il Sole 24 Ore, Die Welt and very many more.
  • Local newspapers are also covered. For example there are 8 from Oxfordshire, including the Oxford Mail.
  • 4200+ trade and professional journals are available. UK journals include the Grocer, Autocar, Campaign and you can find their equivalent in other languages, such as China Aviation News in Chinese script.
  • The full text of all articles are included, but not in facsimile; photographs are not included. Adverts are not included.
  • Australian and Asian newpapers for tomorrow's date are available in Europe. Daily newspaers are generally available on the same day, but you may find that there are some one day embargoes on titles such as the Financial Times.
  • The Times archive dates back to 1981, but this varies between publications.

Factiva also contains company data:

  • 2.4 million company profiles are included.
  • Accounting information, company/industry ratio comparisons and share prices are available for quoted companies.
  • Share prices can be charted and compared to leading stock exchange indices.
  • Foreign exchange rates are available.
  • Most of the data above is available for 5 years and can be downloaded into Excel.
  • Datamonitor SWOT analyses and other reports are available.

Because Factiva is such a large database, searches for news have to be constructed carefully to be very specific about what you want. Otherwise you can retrieve many thousands of articles, more than you can read. Also, you must be very specific about the publications you search. News stories may be repeated in hundreds of newspapers, so select the group of publications you search. The powerpoint presentations below give you advice.

Searching Factiva

Factiva does not work like Google! Casually typing a few words into the search box, a description of what you want, will retrieve too many articles to be helpful. Using the indexes is not intuitive and you will probably need advice. You are strongly recommended to look at the exercise on using this database in our Virtual Learning Course "A guide to using business and economics databases", which covers most (not all) of the business databases. Every student and member of staff can register themselves by consulting the page on the Virtual Learning Course at: http://www.brookes.ac.uk/library/business/virtuallearning.html

However, for your convenience we have linked the exercise from here: https://www2.brookes.ac.uk/library/resources/How_to_use_Factiva.pdf

This document is on the intranet, off campus users will have to enter their Brookes username and password to enter. Register for the course if you want to check the self-test results.

Contact a member of the subject team at businesslibrarians@brookes.ac.uk if you have difficulties.

To connect on or off-campus

Whether on or off campus, click on the link below. You will be asked to enter your student number and Brookes portal password. You will then be taken to an entry for Factiva in your PIP page. Click on the URL you find there to connect directly.

https://kmis.brookes.ac.uk/csms/wath_pack.dbases?db=Factiva

If you have any problems contact: businesslibrarians@brookes.ac.uk