The baffling world of Harvard Business School publications

Just had an interesting question that we might want to be on the lookout for...

A student was supposed to do a "case study" and his instructor had referenced a case number in a format that wasn't familiar to me: HBR 9-700-013. We assumed HBR was Harvard Business Review, but searching that publication didn't seem to work. So I looked through some other HBR articles hoping to find article ID numbers or something else that would point me in the right direction, and noticed that these articles sometimes reference HBS (presumably Harvard Business School) case numbers which had the right format: number-number-number. After more digging, I figured out that these cases are separate publications put out by the Harvard Business School. Didn't appear that we had them, although I think I found them Duke's catalog (the record was ambiguous) and probably some other business schools might, so ILL might be a possibility. They can also be ordered online at [http://www.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbsp/case_studies.jsp]. Although we were hoping the professor might have the publication and could put it on reserve.

Turns out Business Source Premier also indexes Harvard Business School Cases, but not by the case number, only the title. Simply Googling the case number got me as far as a title, though I don't know how reliable a method that would be. (If this particular one comes up again, this one was “Yahoo!: Business on Internet Time,” by J. Rivkin and J. Girotto, 2000).