A technique for organizing social impact studies

      Let me describe one wee exercise which Eddy and I conducted together. I dialed that well-informed computer Eddy knows in Santa Monica, California and asked, through Eddy, what it knew about office automation. ELCOM, an electronic database in the computer's memory, had seven citations containing those words. I asked Eddy to print them out. Three other databases had 49, 57, and 147 citations respectively, containing those words. Since I did not have the time (or the money) to wait till Eddy stuttered out all those citations, I asked him to arrange to send them to me. The package arrived in the mail a few days later.

      Let me focus on the 57 citations contained in the management database, which corresponds to the semi-monthly publication Management Contents. The frontispiece of the print-out and the first page of citations are provided as Figure 2 and Figure 3 respectively. Each citation contains, as you can see, an Accession Number (if I want the full text of any of the articles cited, I can order them, through Eddy, by this number), bibliographical information, index terms and corresponding category codes, document type, and abstract.

      Let me focus, further, on the index terms. I listed those index terms, organized them into categories, and those categories in turn, into larger categories. Thus "computer" was put in the category "office equipment", which was put, in turn into the category "technology." Four major categories emerged - "technology", "society" , "issue", and "methodology".