Reference at Newman Library

Tag: Harvard Business School Publishing

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.

Web of Science-article about a HBR case study

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:

Business Source Complete--Harvard Business School case study record

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.

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).

Harvard Business School Case Studies

To help chip away at the problem of people looking for Harvard Business School case studies in our online collections, I’ve added a trigger in Bearcat Search (what is behind the scenes on the “Articles” search on the library home page) so that if the user searches for them there, they’ll get this canned message at the top of their search results:

Harvard Business Case Studies

  • Not available in any library or database
  • Publisher requires each person must purchase their own copies direct from the publisher’s website

Here’s how it looks on the search results page:

Bearcat Search--best bet--Harvad Business case studies

 

In the admin settings for Bearcat Search, we’re able to create these custom messages and make them appear when users enter search terms that match ones we’ve decided will trigger the message. Here are the search terms that are currently set to trigger this message:

  • harvard business case studies
  • harvard case studies
  • harvard case study
  • case study
  • case studies

If anyone has suggestions about additional trigger search words we should be using, please add them to the comments section of this post.