AMADEUS and FAME

AMADEUS and FAME
Bureau Van Dijk Electronic Publishing (BvDEP) provides detailed, analytical, commercial databases for in-depth research on company information. Trinity Library subscribes to two of BvDEP’s databases: the pan-European database, AMADEUS and the UK/Ireland-specific database, FAME.

Since 2008, TCD readers have spent over 135 hours on the AMADEUS database and more than twice that time consulting FAME. According to Bureau Van Dijk’s statistics, these readers have been looking at detailed reports for over 46 thousand companies. Reports include contact information, credit score and rating, names and addresses of directors and a lot more.

AMADEUS contains financial information on 11 million public and private companies in 41 European countries. FAME provides access to detailed company information for about 2.8 million UK and Irish companies. It also provides summary information for a further half million smaller businesses. On both websites, users can check the currency of the data by using the ‘Support’ tag and the ‘About’ heading to find the ‘last updated’ date.

According to information provided by HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC UK), FAME is used by the major accountancy firms to produce the majority of transfer pricing reports and Amadeus is a popular database for European companies. The format of these databases, both for searching and for the reports is consistent across the two databases.

The HMRC website draws attention to some areas of concern in the use of commercial databases. It notes, for example, potential issues with two key criteria, i.e. business descriptions, which can be subjective, and SIC codes, (grouping companies into sectors) which can be misleading for various reasons, as outlined by the HMRC. There is a very helpful guide entitled Constructing a search model on the HMRC website, which uses FAME as the searched database. The guide is at the base of the HMRC page.

AMADEUS and FAME are not the only business databases subscribed to by the Library. Directed access to specific Business and Economics e-resources is available from the Library website’s Business subject guide page, created by the Library‘s BESS Subject Librarian, Ruth Potterton.

All TCD Library subscription databases can be found on the Library website in the Search Collections box and under the title: Databases and e-Books .