Thomson Reuters Business Classification

Thomson Reuters Business Classification (TRBC) is a hierarchical industry classification scheme. Since 2012 it has five levels of hierarchy: economic sector, business sector, industry group, industry and activity. Activities were added in 2012, before then the classification had four levels.

Each sector has an assigned code; the code describes a place in hierarchy, for example code 50101010 (Coal) is an industry located under industry group 501010 (Coal), business sector 5010 (Energy-Fossil Fuels) and economic sector 50 (Energy). Each level adds 2 digits to the code, so all industries have 8 digit codes.

TRBC codes can be used to search for research documents related to a particular industry. Search for a code will return all documents covering that code, plus codes lower in the hierarchy. For example, searching for Energy economic sector will return all documents about Energy, but also documents about Coal industry, Oil & Gas industry group, Uranium business group and others. On the other hand, search for Uranium will not return documents that cover Energy in general.

TRBC evolved from Reuters Business Classification Scheme (RBSS). Many of the codes in current TRBC specification are the same as in RBSS. However, some codes were discontinued, and some industries were moved to a different place in the hierarchy, so their codes changed.

The decision to offer the most recent TRBC codes in our search engine was a rather straightforward one; the change was almost unnoticeable to our GUI users, and the users of our APIs were forced to make a one-time change, as the old codes stopped working. However, on the collection side we have to deal with all versions now. Many of our contributors are still sending us the discontinued codes, some because they were not informed of the change, others because they are not well equipped to make the change in their end, and others because our online documentation of the new codes is wrong in a few places.

As of now, we discard all outdated codes. However, we're losing valuable information this way, so we're considering mapping the old codes to their newer counterparts.