15 June 2008

Why is Harvard Business Review so bad...

...at observing bibliographical standards? Suppose you have a reference to, say, Davenport's "Competing on analytics", which appeared in the January 6th edition of the journal, and you want to find volume number, part number and pages. The obvious place to go to is the HBR site - right? Wrong! The HBR site is designed to sell you offprints, it is not designed to help you, the author, find the bibliographical details for any of its articles. So much for having a role in scholarly communication, when the Trustees don't even care whether or not anyone can find a specific paper. Sadly, this is symptomatic of much Web publishing - bibliographical standards fly out of the window in the face of the marketing director.

3 comments:

  1. Perhaps it is about time.
    Why not DOI instead of volume, issue, pages.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I must admit HBR is laccking DOI's

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi, Wow!ter - why not DOIs? Because they aren't used universally by journals and because journal editors and readers still want the full bibliographical details :-)

    I can't afford to use DOIs in Information Research, otherwise I'd be happy to do so.

    ReplyDelete