Reference at Newman Library

Tag: Harvard Business Review

New Listing for Harvard Business Review on A-Z Databases

The A-Z database list now features a link for Harvard Business Review. The URL takes you to a new Harvard Business Review LibGuide page that explains all the complicating factors in accessing articles from Harvard Business Review (which we have full text access for the magazine articles going back to 1922 in the Business Source Complete database), including:

  • restrictions on direct linking for all HBR magazine articles
  • restrictions on printing and downloading for selected articles
  • web-only content on the HBR.org website
  • case studies, which aren’t in the magazine anyway, and must be directly purchased by students and faculty

I added a search box on this page that has some hidden code that takes the user’s search term and ANDs it with “harvard business review.” This works pretty well in finding both the magazine articles and the web-only content that can be found in Business Source Complete.

Please look over this new guide to familiarize yourself with all the access issues and options. The decision to add this periodical on our list of databases didn’t come easily, as we normally use the A-Z list for things that truly are databases, given the continuing confusion students and faculty have over this resource, it made sense to give it a standalone listing on the databases page much as we do for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

Full Text Options for Harvard Business Review

For years, the only access to current issues of Harvard Business Review was in Business Source Complete, which offers articles from 1922 to the present. Now, ABI/INFORM Global indicates that it too has full text access to this publication from November 2015 to the present. It’s best to just ignore this claim from ABI/INFORM Global. Here’s why.

The articles that ABI/INFORM Global claims it has full text access to are in reality just records that link out to the subset of articles that are freely available from Harvard Business Review on the magazine’s website. Here’s a sample record in ABI/INFORM Global:

ABI INFORM Global-HBR article record

Like other periodicals on the open web, Harvard Business Review has set up a monthly limit of free articles that you can access. You can view four articles for free; if you try to view a fifth one, you get a web page on the HBR website blocking you and suggesting that you register on the site (a free proess that gives you access to eight free articles a month). This is all needlessly confusing given that we’ve got full text coverage within another database (albeit, that coverage from Business Source Complete has its own set of headaches regarding download restrictions and direct linking/course reserves restrictions).

We’ve contacted ProQuest to complain about this stretching of the concept of “full text” and have added a note to the A-Z journals lookup in Serials Solutions for the journal that indicate the the ABI/INFORM Global option is not the preferred one.

 

 

 

 

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:

  1. 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
  2. A SFX menu opens showing a link to the article in Business Source Complete; user clicks that link
  3. 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).

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.