Hirsch, Alan R. — author record and indexed work

This is an author record. It exists so that a name found in a citation, a footnote or a press article can be resolved to the work actually indexed here, with enough detail to order it, cite it or ask a library for it.

The record

Author: Alan R. Hirsch. One title is indexed under this name: Effects of ambient odors on slot-machine usage in a las vegas casino. It is catalogued as an article in a journal, published in 2006, part of the publication Psychology and Marketing, issued by Wiley Publishing, and indexed under the keywords casino and Las Vegas.

Those fields are the whole record, and deliberately so. A catalogue entry states what can be verified about a document — who wrote it, what it is called, where it appeared, who published it, how it is classified. It does not summarise findings, and an entry that did so would be a review rather than an index.

What the subject area covers

The indexed title belongs to a strand of research on the sensory environment of a casino floor: what the room does to the people in it, as distinct from what the games do. Lighting, sound, temperature, layout, the absence of clocks and windows, and scent have all been studied as variables that can be measured on a real floor or reproduced in a laboratory.

The questions such work asks are narrow on purpose. Does a measurable change in one environmental variable coincide with a measurable change in behaviour — how long people stay, how much they wager, which machines they choose? Narrow questions are what allow a result to be tested by somebody else, and a single study of a single floor is a data point rather than a conclusion about gambling in general.

This matters for readers who arrive from outside the field. Environmental research is easy to quote loosely and hard to quote correctly: the effect described in a paper is usually specific to the setting, the population and the measurement, and the further a claim travels from the original text, the less of that specificity survives. The remedy is to read the paper rather than the summary of the summary.

How to reach the document

Start from the publication rather than the author. A journal article is located by its journal, volume and pages, and a library or a document supply service will find it from that faster than from a name. University libraries can request a copy even when they do not hold a subscription, and many publishers sell single articles directly.

If you are citing the work, cite the journal version, not this record. An index entry is a pointer; it carries no page numbers, and a citation that points at a catalogue instead of the article is a citation nobody can follow.

Why author records look sparse

A research library indexes authors and publications separately, because the same person can appear as a sole author, a co-author, an editor and a cited source, and because names collide. A sparse author page with one indexed title usually means exactly that: one work by this name has been catalogued here, not that the person wrote only one thing. Other works may sit in other libraries, under a different form of the name, or under a co-author.

That is also why an author record is worth keeping stable. Citations point at it from outside for years, and a pointer that keeps working is the main service a catalogue provides.