Financial and company information

Financial resources, unlike academic materials, do not always have straightforward rules to cite and reference. You must acknowledge your sources to avoid plagiarism.

Cite Them Right Online has guidelines for citing and referencing common types of financial materials. 

Before you begin, consider where your information came from and choose the relevant guidelines.

• Company annual reports - Use these guidelines if you used financial information which you obtained directly from the company. 
• Financial Reports from Online Databases - Use these guidelines if you downloaded financial information about a company from a database online, such as Fame, Mergent or WRDS. 
• Reports from Other Databases (No URL) - Use these guidelines if you obtained data or information from a database on-site, such as Bloomberg, Eikon or Morningstar.

Some of our specialist financial databases, such as Bloomberg, Eikon and Morningstar, do not have URLs to direct your readers to. Follow the instructions in Cite Them Right to cite and reference these databases:

• Referencing reports from databases with no URL, such as Bloomberg, Eikon and Morningstar

How does it look? You would cite these references in your text using the database name and the year of publication or last update, for instance (Bloomberg, 2017). If you have several references to the same database in the same year, follow the instructions in Cite Them Right Online under Citing sources published in the same year by the same author.

Top Tip: The most important thing about constructing your reference list is that it remains consistent, so if you are in doubt about how to reference something and must make a guess, look carefully at other types of references in the same style and construct it to match as well as you can.