Harvard Business Review (HBR): magazine or journal?

solaro

Harvard Business Review (HBR) is a general management magazine founded in 1922.

Its articles are devoid of footnotes/references, don't have a DOI, and are primarly addressed to managers and other business practitioners.

HBR has full-color pages, fancy graphics and a lot of ads.

Anyway, many important articles in the field of management are just HBR pieces, written by top scholars who also regularly contribute to proper academic journals (Michael E. Porter, Henry Mintzberg, Clayton M. Christensen, etc.).

If you take a typical article in a peer-reviewed management journal, it's likely you will find a few references to HBR articles.

Here is a classic HBR article:

Title: How competitive forces shape strategy
Author: Porter, Michael E.
Publication: Harvard Business Review
Volume: 57
Issue: 2
Date: March-April 1979
Pages: 137-145
URL: https://hbr.org/1979/03/how-competitive-forces-shape-strategy

In fact, volume and issue are frequently omitted in citations.

That said, here are my questions:

1. What is the proper way to add HBR articles to Zotero? "Magazine Article" or "Journal Article"?

2. Is it possible that HBR articles will have a DOI in the future? (In Zotero the "Magazine Article" item type don't have a DOI field).

Thanks.

adamsmith

I'd cite HBR as a journal because of the volume/issue combination. DOI will be added to all item types in Zotero in the future, so that's not determinative either way (you can already add it using DOI: 10.12345/6789 in the Extra field -- citation styles will use that information.

solaro

In fact, volume and issue are rarely used for HBR (volume is simple the year of publication: the current volume is 100).

Anyway I agree with you in citing HBR as journal. It's not peer-reviewed but it has even an impact factor (very low indeed).

In the field of management there are many other magazine/journal hybrids, generally published by business schools or consulting firms: MIT Sloan Management Review, McKinsey Quarterly, strategy+business...

It would be desirable if we had a clear and objective criterion to distinguish between a (trade) magazine and a journal.

bwiernik

HBR is generally cited like a journal article in psychology and management research. Use Journal Article

AbeJellinek

(Also, we have a translator for HBR. That means that you can just click the Connector's Save to Zotero button and get correct metadata, close to what you wrote for the article you linked, without much effort.)