ABSTRACT
This chapter is based on a content analysis of more than 621 papers published by the Human Factors Society during the years 1965 to 1995. The papers were divided into two classes: empirical and nonempirical studies. Human factors/ergonomics (HFE) research demonstrates a common tendency in primitive disciplines—an increasing academicazation and professionalism, which has tended to alienate the discipline from the system development and applications questions that were originally the source of the discipline. The chapter describes empirical HFE research as published in two documents: Human Factors and the Proceedings of the annual meetings of the Human Factors Society. To measure system performance, the researcher must reorient his or her research interest from the individual to the system or to the system as well as the individual. There are several major players in the history of HFE research: the individual researcher, the community of researchers as a whole, the cultural context in which research is performed, and the funding agencies.
