Question

We're researching business information (market data such as revenues, trends, etc) for the migraine treatment market.  Can you could provide recommendations for finding such information?

Response

For market research around pharmaceutical products I usually start with a quick search in Market Share Reporter (part of the Gale Directory Library accessible online via NCSU Libraries). In this case it identified only one entry that reported the top 4 brands from 2008.

It's not a whole lot of information but gives me a little bit more to go on. For instance, you can look up the financial filings for the companies that produce the leading brands above - from the S.E.C. or their corporate website - usually under investor relations or something like that. The companies don't have to break out their sales by product type but sometimes they do - e.g. You can download the Merk 10-K from here:

http://www.merck.com/investors/financials/annual-reports/home.html

and do a keyword search in the document for the product/brand name, "Maxalt" - to navigate to the sales figures.

Since this is such a prominent and regulated industry, you can also search the web using Google - sometimes you can get at the deeper web and block out the noise by limiting your results to filetyp:pdf - for example, I searched for "Imitrex 42.2% Maxalt Relpax Zomig filetyp:pdf" and found a free source of industry reports relating to drug trends:

http://www.express-scripts.com/industryresearch/industryreports/drugtrendreport/2008

You can also use aggregated news sources like Lexis Nexis Academic to quickly get a sense of any significant trends in the industry (e.g. patents expiring for major products, generics entering the market and impact on sales).

Here an example of my search strategy:

Lexis Nexis Academic > General Search (tab) > Power search
Search for: migraine w/2 (treatment or drug or relief)
Topics/add keywords or index terms: and (Product development or sales figure or company revenues or trends)
Source: Major World Publications
Once you get the results, Show: Expanded List and Sort: Relevance

You can try running other searches changing some of the parameters like different keywords (e.g. some of the articles mentioned the phrase "short-term contract workers" ) or the Source (e.g. if you change the General Search tab to the News tab, you can select a source called "Business news publications" using the drop down menu) and of course the publication date parameters.