Biblio-Theses/Reports

We also believe in a relatively unused and unconventional set of scientific publications as a source of information bits for the SPT. These include reports on research grants that are required for all funded government projects in basic science, and the many M.S. and Ph.D. theses produced each year in the United States and worldwide. Nowadays these are more readily available and obtainable than in previous years. They are sometimes included in the new library search engines available at all our university libraries for free use.

Some of our graduate students spend from two to five years in intensive study of a very advanced research topic and we should make use of them. From my personal experience, I would like to point to just one particular exemplar. In looking into Systems Pathology as a new spin-off of Systems Processes Theory I came across a recent  Ph.D. Thesis by Dr. Polinho Katina which already had devoted xxx pages to documenting cases of Systems Pathology in Systems Engineering under the direction of his Ph.D. advisor Dr. Chuck Keating at Old Dominion University.

The other advantage of including graduate Theses as part of our set of sources for systems research is that these are produced by young and open-minded new workers who may more readily investigate inter- and transdisciplinary topics like the isomorphies than their predecessors. They are not yet burdened by the strict, silo, specialist thinking and “publish or perish” dictates of those in tenure track positions who have to produce conventional reductionist empirical studies in order to advance professionally. I want to emphasize that the publication industry and government agencies are as addicted to solely disciplinary specialty as are the university departments. Even our libraries are siloed. Try to find a systems-level approach and you will find it only in one or another of the segregated Dewey Decimal system taxonomy completely distorting the transdisciplinary attempt.