Reference USA provides information on millions of US and Canadian businesses, as well as residents. The information found from the searches is mostly in numerical format- such as how many sales the companies have carried out, all of its business expenditures, all the way to how many employees the company has. There is no controlled vocabulary in conducting searches. A unique feature about this search is that each company overview contains a Google map feature which helps to automatically locate the companies location instantly.
LexisNexis provides users with many newspaper articles, as well as business, legal and reference information. There is controlled vocabulary, in order to help users narrow their searches down, and get information that is more relevant to their topic. The information on this database is usually given in article form. What’s unique about LexisNexis is that it has a category box called source, where users are given the opportunity to choose where they would want their article to come from, in order to set the standards for what kind of information it would contain.
