Business Source Complete – Reference at Newman Library

Harvard Business Review Case Studies

Another tip from Rita: records for Harvard Business Review case studies (or things that look like they might be records for them) are turning up in confusing places. We’ve all known for a long time that the only way students or faculty can get full text access to Harvard Business Review case studies is to buy them directly from the publisher. But our students will often see things in our databases that look like they might give access. Here are some examples that Rita recently alerted me to.

Article Records That Are About a Case Study

Here is an example of an article record in Web of Science (that can also be found in OneSearch) has a title that can easily lead some users to think that it contains the full text. Note that it includes a “Find It @ CUNY” button. If the user were to click that, they’d get a window suggesting that full text is not available but that the item could be requested via ILL, which in fact would not be possible.

This situation is not unlike those articles that turn up in Factiva announcing the publication of some marketing report that leads users to think we must have access to it somewhere.

Records in Business Source Complete for Case Studies

Until today, I didn’t know that EBSCO has indexed all of the Harvard Business School case studies. If you go to this publications listing for “Harvard Business School Cases” in Business Source Complete, you can browse all the records that are included. Here’s a sample record for one of these indexed case studies:

Note that this record, too, also features a “Find It @ CUNY” button. Clicking that button will also lead you to a window that mistakenly gives the impression that the item can be ILLed.

What To Do

When users ask about the case studies, there’s not much more we can do than steer them to the publisher’s website to purchase them. We’ll bring these issues up with EBSCO and Ex Libris to see if there’s something to be done about the way link resolvers display for HBR case studies, as this special content breaks the usual patterns and rules we have about ILL, full text access, etc.

Fix to Harvard Business Review in SFX Menus

This spring, we discovered that the Find It service was not working for articles rom the Harvard Business Review (HBR). This is what it looked like:

User finds an article record in a database where HBR was not available in full text but is indexed; user then clicks the “Find It” icon
A SFX menu opens showing a link to the article in Business Source Complete; user clicks that link
When Business Source Complete opens, the user sees an article record for the requested article but there are no links to the full text (even though it is actually in the database if you then search for it directly)

It turns out that EBSCO was just hiding the full text thanks to the troublesome deal that EBSCO and Harvard Business School Press have that forbids direct linking to HBR articles unless your library pays an additional subscription fee (see these recent blog posts for details). On the SFX mailing list, a workaround was suggested that I asked CUNY OLS to implement (CUNY OLS manages the SFX service for all CUNY libraries).

Now, when you get a SFX menu, you’ll get a working direct link to the full text of article. The link is labeled “Harvard Business Review (EBSCOhost).” You can see what this looks like on this SFX menu.

The 500 Articles from Harvard Business Review You Can’t Download

As a follow up to earlier posts here on the reference blog about the restrictions that Harvard Business School Press has put on how we can search and use articles from the Harvard Business Review, I thought I’d share this list of the 500 articles that the publisher has decided can’t be downloaded or printed from Business Source Complete (pdf).

Full Text Links and Cited References Lists in Business Source Complete

Ryan alerted me to a problem that I just reported to EBSCO. If you are in Business Source Complete and click on the “Cited References” link on the left side of an article record, you’ll be taken to a page that lists all the sources used in the article. Below each source is our “Find It” icon that links to our SFX service. For some sources on this list, though, there is both the “Find It” icon AND a link to the full text in HTML or PDF form. Here’s a screenshot of an example of that problem. The article where I took that screenshot from is:

Porter, Michael E. “Consumer Behavior, Retailer Power And Market Performance In Consumer Goods Industries.” Review Of Economics & Statistics 56.4 (1974): 419. Business Source Complete. Web. 21 Feb. 2014.

http://remote.baruch.cuny.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=4642498&site=ehost-live

The full text links work fine and aren’t really a problem, but ideally, the “Find It” button shouldn’t also be showing if the full text is indeed available.

Find It Links in Business Source Complete for WSJ Don’t Work

If you find a record for a Wall Street Journal article in Business Source Complete and try to click the “Find it” button to get to the full text, the link on the SFX menu that opens up will offer a link to the full text in ABI/INFORM Global. That link, though, will fail once you are taken into ABI/INFORM Global. The full text of the Wall Street Journal is actually there in ABI/INFORM Global and can still be found by searching within the ABI/INFORM Global interface for the article; the problem is that EBSCO and ProQuest have different ways of indexing articles from the WSJ. That difference makes the Find It service from SFX fail, as the metadata that EBSCO has doesn’t match up with what ProQuest has.

EBSCO support told me that they are aware of this problem and are working to resolve it. It’s not clear how long it may be before it is fixed.

Here are some screenshots to illustrate the problem we are currently seeing:

A Wall Street Journal article record in Business Source Complete…

…clicking the “Find it” button opens up a SFX menu window that looks like this…

…clicking the “Full Text Online” link in the SFX menu window takes you into ABI/INFORM Global but fails to find the article…

…even though the article is really findable in ABI/INFORM Global if you search for it:

Restrictions on Harvard Business Review Articles for Course Reserve

In case you hadn’t seen the notices that have been going up in various places lately (such as this one from the Baruch weekly e-news that just came in via email), faculty are being notified that due to licensing restrictions from Harvard Business School Press there are restrictions on use of articles from Harvard Business Review, which is exclusively available from ESBCO in Business Source Complete.

Here is the announcement from the weekly e-news:

Restrictions on Use of the Harvard Business Review
Baruch College faculty are advised that special restrictions regarding the use of the Harvard Business Review for course reserves have been put in place. The license agreement for the College’s digital version of the Harvard Business Review in EBSCOhost does not permit article-level linking from the database to course reserves, as the agreement does for all other publications in the database. This is a restriction imposed by the Harvard Business Review. As a result, the library cannot place articles from this journal on e-reserve. Faculty who assign articles from the Harvard Business Review in their courses may direct students to search for the article directly in the EBSCOhost database Business Source Complete. If you have any questions please contact the library’s access services department.

Accounting assignment on “push down accounting”

I helped a student in Acc 4100 who is part of a team doing research and a presentation on “push down accounting.” They are to include references to companies using push down accounting. Here are some possible sources:

Books 24×7 -search FinancePro collection for phrase “push down accounting”. There are some books with chapters explaining this phrase.

ABI Inform and Business Source Premier can be searched for articles in accounting journals. These can help explain push down accounting, which results in a new basis (from what I read quickly–I really didn’t study it).

CCH Accounting Research Manager–offers the FASB Codification and interpretations and explanations. The FASB Codification relating to push down accounting is 805-50-15-7 through 15-9. Among the results I looked at were some AICPA issues papers including pushdown accounting in practice with examples from the 1970s and 1980s mentioned.

For current/recent examples, I suggested to the student to try Factiva as we found some earnings releases (from Business Wire and other wire services) and also earnings conference calls in which a specific company’s officers explained how push down accounting affected their earnings.

Doing phrase searches for push down accounting in SEC filings on Mergent and Edgar Online I-Metrix also provided some recent examples.

The student was pleased with these suggestions. I neglected to ask if they were to consider non-US companies. I hope these suggestions are helpful in case the question comes up again.