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It is now forty years since there appeared H. R. Plomer's first volume Dictionary of the booksellers and printers who were at work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1641 to 1667. This has been followed by additional Bibliographical Society publications covering similarly the years up to 1775. From the short sketches given in this series, indicating changes of imprint and type of work undertaken, scholars working with English books issued before the closing years of the eighteenth century have had great assistance in dating the undated and in determining the colour and calibre of any work before it is consulted.

The purpose of this paper is to find ways to develop more efficient mass transit systems across the USA and, thus, make the best use of state/federal/municipal government funds and taxpayers’ monies. This paper conducts benchmarking studies. In doing so, this paper identifies the best-in class mass transit practices that every regional mass transit system can emulate.

The continuous underutilization of a mass transit system can increase public scrutiny concerning the increased investment in mass transit services. To defuse such scrutiny, this paper analyzes the past (in year 2011) performances of 515 mass transit agencies in the USA using data envelopment analysis (DEA). Also, to identify which factors influences those performances, the authors paired DEA scores for transit efficiency at the state level against a set of independent variables using a special form of regression analysis called Tobit regression.

The authors found that the greater population density of the service area, the greater number of riders can be served in a short amount of distance and time. Also, the authors discovered that the transportation mode of mass transit services could affect mass transit efficiency. On the other hand, the authors found no evidence indicating that the public ownership or private operation of transit systems could make any differences in the transit efficiency.

This paper is one of the few that assessed the performance of mass transit systems in comparison to their peers using a large-scale data and identify the leading causes of mass transit inefficiency. Thus, this paper helps transit authorities in handling juggling acts of protecting the conflicting interests of government policy makers against the general public and, then, make sensible future investment decisions.

This chapter shows how the theory of industrial organization can help us understand some important aspects of crowdfunding that go beyond the finance sphere of the firm. A special attention is devoted to the role and behavior of crowdfunding platforms, which intermediate between entrepreneurs and contributors.

The purpose of this paper is to benchmark and measure the comparative efficiency of emergency medical services (EMS) in major US cities (populations greater than 100,000). In so doing, this paper aims to develop a benchmark that can be emulated by cities lagging in EMS efficiency. Also, it seeks to develop a profile of cities that are successful in providing highly efficient EMS as benchmarks.

Data envelopment analysis is used to measure the EMS efficiency of 127 selected large cities in the USA under the premise of a constant‐return to scales method of service delivery. In addition, to identify factors influencing the US cities' EMS efficiency and then to predict their efficiency scores, a Tobit regression analysis is employed, which tended to result in a smaller standard error, a smaller bias, and a smaller mean squared error than ordinary least squares.

This paper examines whether more densely settled and populated areas have greater efficiency in delivering EMS. After controlling variables such as weather and climate, income, population growth, the age of a residential home, and geographic size of a city in land area, It is found that more densely settled, geographically large, and high income cities show more efficient provision of EMS.

This paper is the first to develop in a comprehensive way EMS benchmark performance standards for municipal governments and elaborate on a host of factors which are associated with the success of EMS deliveries. By setting such standards and identifying factors affecting EMS efficiency, this paper helps municipal governments to continuously improve their EMS and develop more efficient public policy.

Due to mounting fiscal pressures, the federal government as well as many state and municipal governments in the USA have had to re-examine their transportation policies. Tax increases and/or spending cuts which aim to trim budget deficits are preoccupations of most policy makers and legislative bodies nowadays. With regard to the task of building new or rehabilitating old bridges, highways, and toll gates, cost-benefit analysis and economic impact studies are often undertaken by various government entities to rank and prioritize spending in the hopes of maximizing fiscal efficiency and road usage benefits. Since most highway construction and maintenance expenditures are absorbed by state governments, it is mostly up to state policy makers to decide transportation priorities. Not much research to date has been conducted to evaluate the comparative efficiency of state road provision to commuters and shippers. Such research would be useful to a state government’s budgetary allocation, road planning, and spending plans. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper uses data envelopment analysis under both constant and variable returns-to-scale and then to explain variations in efficiency ratings by using Tobit regression analysis.

The authors discovered that the greater the level of state resident income and/or the warmer the weather, the higher the road or mass transit provision efficiency on average. The authors also found that greater urbanization in a state had little to do with efficiencies with respect to road provision.

This paper is one of the first to assess and evaluate the comparative efficiency of road provision across 50 states in the USA and then set a benchmark for utilizing state financial resources to improve road infrastructure. More importantly, this paper helps transportation planners and public policy makers better allocate their limited financial resources to public goods in time of budget cutbacks and shortfalls.

This paper aims to investigate doctoral examiners' narratives on their expectations of the candidate's oral performance in the PhD viva. Both the PhD examiners and handbooks that offer advice on the PhD viva preparation appear to share the same expectation of the candidate's oral performance in the viva. That is, candidates must answer questions to the satisfaction of examiners to warrant a pass in the oral examination. However, what constitutes a satisfactory viva performance – let alone an excellent one – is often undefined.

Using narrative inquiry as the guiding research approach to investigate this issue, 12 experienced doctoral examiners from across the disciplines at a Malaysian research university were interviewed. Their narratives were analysed inductively.

The findings show that examiners expect candidates to speak the language of defence by manifesting confident, interactional behaviour, providing credible and convincing responses and displaying doctoralness. The aspects of candidate's oral performance undesired by the examiners, as well as the reasons for having such expectations, are also discussed. The paper argues that the expectations of examiners in the PhD viva should be made explicit and communicated to the candidates and examiners to ensure a positive doctoral assessment process and outcome.

This paper contributes to the literature on doctoral assessment, particularly on the PhD viva, through the voices of examiners in the Global South. It also offers an examiner expectancy model of the PhD viva.

The concept of interestingness has been investigated in several management disciplines but studies mobilizing such concept in supply chain management (SCM) to develop strategies for the field's advancement are relatively scarce. This research paper aims to investigate how SCM scholars rank attributes of interestingness and the strategies to harness interestingness in the field of SCM.

The authors adopt a mixed methods research design in which a survey on SCM researchers' ranking of interestingness' attributes and qualitative interviews with selected academics are conducted.

The findings highlight the importance given by SCM scholars to attributes such as rigor, relevance, novelty and communication and how they are interrelated. Also, other interestingness attributes are underlined by scholars during the qualitative interviews including inquisitiveness, engaging the reader, imaginativeness and entertainment. Furthermore, a research agenda to synthesize the propositions to develop interesting research is also proposed.

Interestingness attributes such as rigor, relevance and novelty are discussed. Recommendations for interesting research are suggested which can be useful to scholars and journal editors. The findings of this research are also relevant for practitioners for a better understanding of academic/practice relationships to develop high impact collaboration.

This paper is among the few studies that focus on interestingness in SCM research from the perspective of scholars. In doing so, the authors seek to contribute to the classic debate in SCM field about “relevance-rigour” duality by providing a broader outlook based on interestingness and proposing a research agenda for prospective studies in the field.

Few studies have investigated the relationship between work-family human resource practices and firm-level outcomes. Several organizational studies have addressed the antecedents to firm adoption of work-family initiatives; however, the majority of work-family research investigates the relationship between work-family practices and individual-level outcomes. The current paper begins by providing a critical analysis and synthesis of the extant work-family literature. In addition, we integrate the organizational learning research on firm commitment to work-family policies and the human resource model. We suggest that the level of firm commitment moderates the relationship between work-family policies, the human resource model, and firm performance. Several propositions for future work-family research are presented.

This paper introduces a new quinquennial dataset of educational inequality disaggregated by age group for 146 countries, from 1950 to 2010, by using the Gini index of education as a measure of the distribution of years of schooling. Based on recent estimates of average years of schooling from Barro and Lee (2010), our calculations take into consideration, for the first time, the changes over time in the duration of educational stages, in each country and for each age group. The downward trends in educational inequality observed during the last decades depend on age group, gender, and development level.