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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of instruments defined as artefacts, rules, models or norms, in the articulation between knowing‐in‐practice and knowledge, in learning processes.

The paper focuses on a distributed, knowledge‐intensive and instrumented activity at the core of any collective action: qualification. The particular case of breeding activities in the livestock sector has been studied, where collective practices of animal qualification for collective breeding have been studied. Qualitative data stemming from in‐depth interviews and observation of daily practices have been analysed, combining practice‐based approaches on knowing processes and science philosophers' theories on the use of instruments during action.

The study of instruments used in daily practices allows us to go beyond the dichotomy between opposite types of knowledge, i.e. scientific knowledge seen as a stock, and sensible knowledge seen as purely tacit and equated to non‐instrumented practices. Instruments are not merely mediators in learning processes; they also take an active part in shaping and activating knowledge and learning processes.

Further research is needed on the designing of reflexive instrumentation, which takes knowing and knowledge articulation into account better.

Using instruments as a key concept to analyse knowing‐in‐practice processes has both methodological and managerial implications for identifying those instruments that favour learning processes.

This paper complements more classical practice‐based approaches by proposing a new perspective on instruments in learning processes, which is particularly relevant to the study of pluralistic organisations where power is diffuse.

The Method section of research articles offers an important space for researchers to describe their research processes and research objects they utilize. To understand the relationship between these research materials and their representations in scientific publications, this paper offers a quantitative examination of the citation contexts of the most frequently cited references in the Method section of the paper sample, many of which belong to the category of research material objects.

In this research, the authors assessed the extent to which these references appear in the Method section, which is regarded as an indicator of the instrumentality of the reference. The authors also examined how this central measurement is connected to its other citation contexts, such as key linguistic attributes and verbs that are used in citation sentences.

The authors found that a series of key linguistic attributes can be used to predict the instrumentality of a reference. The use of self-mention phrases and the readability score of the citances are especially strong predictors, along with boosters and hedges, the two measurements that were not included in the final model.

This research focuses on a single research domain, psychology, which limits the understanding of how research material objects are cited in different research domains or interdisciplinary research contexts. Moreover, this research is based on 200 frequently cited references, which are unable to represent all references cited in psychological publications.

With the identified relationship between instrumental citation contexts and other characteristics of citation sentences, this research opens the possibility of more accurately identifying research material objects from scientific references, the most accessible scholarly data.

This is the first large-scale, quantitative analysis of the linguistic features of citations to research material objects. This study offers important baseline results for future studies focusing on scientific instruments, an increasingly important type of object involved in scientific research.

The peer review history for this article is available at: 10.1108/OIR-03-2021-0171

Besides the technological challenge of flying a space probe for ten years before arriving at the final mission destination, one is confronted with a potential loss of knowledge during this period. The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of the general knowledge management applied for such a mission. It aims to give details for a new approach, the video approach, to capture expertise knowledge of engineers and scientists.

The video approach included the visit of all instrument teams for several days, executing interviews with engineers, technicians and scientists. During the interviews a table of content (/toc/) with attached keywords was generated. The final video was transferred into a computer‐readable form and connected with the table of content. The methodology that was used to prepare and execute the interviews, the final video material and the storage and structure of the table of content and keywords is presented.

The experimenter interviews and the follow‐up work are finished. The paper finds that feedback received so far is positive and some experimenter teams use the approach for internal work.

The existing videos are not integrated into the existing standard office environment. Another technology step needs to integrate video capture, search and play into the existing, e.g. document processing, environment. The quality of the approach is difficult to estimate as the captured information might only be used in the years to come.

Proof of concept is given and lessons‐learned listed.

An new approach is documented giving technical implementation, setup, execution and approach details. Suitable as a reference paper for any organization with similar knowledge management requirements.

There are two basic forms of scientific communication: discussion and publication. In both forms, electronic versions have appeared over the Internet to challenge the viability of traditional instruments. Gives a discourse of the tools available and explains why electronic digests appear to provide the best scope in supplanting newsletters; their traditional counterpart.

In the scientific instrument industry, measuring devices are tested and evaluated using various criteria. One test is for accuracy: how precisely does the instrument monitor changes in the variables it is designed to measure? Another test is for repeatability: will the instrument (or several different copies of the same instrument) consistently give an accurate reading when essentially similar conditions are duplicated time and again? A third test is for efficiency: does the instrument carry out the measurement rapidly and economically, taking full advantage of innovations in technology?

This study aims to support researchers and practitioners in finding suitable instruments for future research studies and organizational quality assessments.

Employees’ success of learning at work is strongly influenced by the quality of the workplace learning environment. In the recent decades growing effort has been given to the development of surveys to measure the quality of workplace learning, resulting in a large number of available survey instruments. This study conceptually draws on a 3-P model and uses a qualitative metasynthesis to collect and categorize n = 94 surveys that intend to measure the quality of workplace learning (WPL).

The results underline that research on WPL environments is a highly interdisciplinary endeavor, where every discipline enriches the field by a new perspective and own foci. Overall, this study finds a focus on learning culture and working conditions, on social and functional inclusion of the learner and on support and feedback during training. Products of WPL such as professional competences or career aspirations play a minor role.

With the integration of quality measurement instruments from various research studies, this study produces an interactive online instrument map that gives a broad, yet organized overview of available quality measures in the WPL field.

Cybernetics started when Wiener stated that not only observations but also the way the observer feeds them back into reality are part of science. Dynamic system analysis supported the art and science of steering with feedback by computer modelling techniques. Cybernetics introduced the question of how self‐reference functioned in the feedback between observer and models. This led to the idea of cybernetics of the second order. Analyses the logic of feedback and how it relates to the question of how logical, mathematical and linguistic instruments can articulate scientific observations and connected theories. Uses the concept of complexity to relate cybernetics to the interdisciplinary practice of modern science. Presents the notion of “strangification” as a concept by which the transfer of knowledge from one discipline to another can be better understood and facilitated.

Reducing Level of Alcohol in Inks ‐ A medium‐sized US ink manufacturer recently needed to reduce the level of alcohol in its bases for water‐based inks. Ciba Geigy Pigments Division's Inks Technical Centre developed an improved formulation, containing half the alcohol of the previous one and 40 per cent more pigment to allow the ink producer to meet VOC limits and increase production efficiency, at no additional cost.

This exhibition was primarily intended to show something of the variety of bibliographies and abstracting journals in the English language. It was not intended to be comprehensive; and although an effort was made to include the most authorative works in each field, in some cases the works shown could claim to be little more than representative.