Business Rankings Annual

Book excerpt: The staff of the Business Library of the Brooklyn Public Library answers more than 175,000 reference questions each year, many of them requests for rankings information. To provide quick answers to questions in the highest interest subject areas, we have compiled Business Rankings Annual. Working from a bibliographic file we have built up over the years, we have culled thousands of items from periodicals, newspapers, financial services, directories, statistical annuals and other printed material. The "top ten" from each of these rankings appears in this volume, grouped under standard subject headings for easy browsing. Typical entries provide: sequential entry number; rankings title: A descriptive phrase, identifying the contents of the list cited; ranked by: Indicates the criteria that establish the hierarchy; remarks: Provides additional details relating to the list from the source material; number listed: Notes the number of listees in the ranking source; top 10 items on the list; and source. Readers can quickly locate all rankings in which a given company; person or product appears by consulting the reference's comprehensive index. In addition, a complete listing of more than 300 sources used to compile Business Rankings Annual is provided in the bibliography.