How Universities Use Business Databases For Research

It’s back-to-school time for universities everywhere, meaning students are back to taking notes, studying for exams, preparing presentations, and conducting research - but do you know how universities provide the exact information their students need across ever broadening fields of study?

The answer is next generation business databases and research services. These one-stop shops provide places of higher-education with a broad collection of financial and economic data, along with the analytics and cloud-based delivery that their users demand. Generally locked down to IP-addresses associated with the university, students can easily find data for term papers and theses, libraries can provide a simple research tool, and even professors can use these databases for their classrooms or research projects.

Historically professors, business libraries, and students would spend time searching for and aggregating all of the content that they needed across diverse sources and data structure formats. It was a lot of duplicated work!

Eventually universities started looking for better solutions. Portals that allowed users to access multiple databases from one website was a start, but each database still had its own proprietary format, data structure, and required cleaning, modifying, and munging to present users with valuable insights. As any data junkie knows, cleaning, organizing, and combining data takes far more time than generating inferences themselves.

That’s where the next generation of business databases came in. With various data sources unified in one standard format that is cleaned, enriched, and well documented, users can spend less time cleaning data and more time generating insights - or at least free up some time to spend tailgating!

Universities can use big data solutions - like cmdtyStats from Barchart - to give students and faculty access to many databases in one simple API for economic data and commodity statistics. Our solution allows users to easily pull data from the CFTC, Bureau of Economic Analysis, USDA, U.S. Census Bureau, Energy Information Administration, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Eurostats, StatsCan, and more.

With access to over 36,000 data series, hundreds of countries, reports, and measures cmdtyStats is the only database that universities need for global fundamental and commodities data. Our deep knowledge of this data allows us to create rich metadata and categorization that does the heavy lifting so clients can work more efficiently. Our parameter explorer makes finding the data series you need easy so users can hit the ground running.

Universities can easily offer this data to empower thought leadership, historical analysis, and offer valuable insights through the school library, computer labs or other easily accessible means. This data can be accessed in many ways and our IP-address enabled distribution makes getting this powerful data into the hands of your students and faculty incredibly easy.

To learn more about any of our services drop us a line at cmdty@barchart.com or reach out here - https://www.barchart.com/cmdty/contact.