Search results

This article takes a light‐hearted look at the reasons why research is conducted. The research community itself comes under investigation.

A programme of group discussions among buyers of research revealed a variety of reasons for commissioning work. Although much research is conducted for rational reasons, the evidence suggests that power struggles within companies are of major importance in deciding exactly what projects shall be undertaken and several categories of “political” research emerged. The relationship between the research buyer and his researcher can be adversely affected if one or other (usually the researcher) suffers from “boffin syndrome”. A classification of research projects is offered. For research buyers, jobs can be boring or interesting; in type, there are methodical jobs, “panic” jobs and “couch” jobs—which begin and end in therapeutic advice from the buyer to the research user.

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.