Acquiring scientific publications LO13839

Ragnar S. Johansen (ragnar-s.johansen@orklafoods.telemax.no)
04 Jun 1997 16:52:25 +0200

Hi, everybody. This subject has annoyed me for some time now:

I expect that most of us hold masters-degrees of some sort. A central
element in any MS is the ability to read scientific publications (e.g.
journals). But I find that I hardly ever access such sources of knowledge
after "growing up" and starting to work.

Most books (they are easier to come by) in the broadly defined
"management-market" have one central message. This message is almost
always previously published in some journal, in a more compressed form
(suitable for highly educated but time-pressed practitioners). Why are
these publications so hardly available?

One would need several journals. In the field of organizational learning,
contributions may be published in organizations-, strategic-, sociological
and many more kind of journals. Each of these fields, of course, sports
dozens of major journals. Just staying on top of who?s publishing where
and when is a major difficulty. Of course all these subscriptions would
cost a considerable amount of money, and the effectiveness gain from the
compressed material would be outweighed by the effort to stay on top of it
all.

BUT: Now, we have the Internet! This is no problem at all, anymore. You'd
just tap into the big "Scientific Publications-database" and check the
areas you wish to follow, specify certain authors and a mix of keywords
that would trigger an e-mailed offer. I'd be quite happy to pay, either
per article or a flat access-fee for such a service.

WHY DOESN'T ANYBODY DO THIS?

The challenge is out! If I'm lucky, this exists already, and you can tell
me where it is. If it doesn't, I hope someone out there may see a
commercial potential in this idea.

But wait: The sun is shining, the working day is over, and there's cold
Danish beer in the fridge ... I'm off!

[Host's Note: Ragnar, keep one cold for me! I find that a really good
library is a wonderful asset... Some months ago, after reading several
msgs hear about John Warfield's many published articles, I had a
productive afternoon over in the library reading them. I hadn't been to
the library in a long time. ...Rick]

Ragnar Johansen

-- 

"Ragnar S. Johansen" <ragnar-s.johansen@orklafoods.telemax.no>

Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>