In addition to looking at demographic changes, you need to look at how consumers spend their money. This database provides access to thousands of tables relating to consumation statistics, product forecasts, demographics, trends, market shares, company and brand rankings, industry forecasts, and more. Some of these indexes provide the full text of articles. For more information on trends, you may want to browse the stacks under the call number CB161. Sometimes you can discover trends just by browsing popular news magazines, such as Business Week , U.S. News and World Report, Newsweek , and Time .
Current newspapers can also be a good source of trend information.
Public opinion data can also be a good source for identifying trends. You also need to identify legislative issues and trends as part of an external assessment. You will need to rely heavily on articles published in trade periodicals as well as news magazines and newspapers. Use these indexes to obtain the citations to relevant articles, and in some cases, the actual article. Again, some of the best sources of information will be in periodical and newspaper articles.