New Developments in Biological Abstracting And Indexing

CURRENTISSUES facing abstracting and indexing services serving scientists in biology, medicine, and agriculture bring into sharp focus the pressures which result from accelerating needs and from the impact of contemporary technology on document preparation and control. Nonetheless, the patterns of publication of scientific litera-ture which we may describe today have been shaped during the past two hundred years, The eighteenth century saw the introduction of primary journals and the nineteenth century the introduction of sec-ondary announcement media, In data graphed by Conrad,l the ratio between primary journals and abstracting services has decreased stead-ily during the twentieth century. The demand appears to be rising for correlations and selected announcements of portions of a given body of primary sources, and this demand can be met only by an increasing variety of abstracting and indexing services. One of the factors behind the creation and growth of such services is the inter-disciplinary nature of scientific research and technological develop-ment. There is a growing interdependence between those doing re-search in the life sciences and those working in the physical sciences and mathematics. A Decade of Change. We are nearing the end of a decade in which the rates of increase in the literature, in the population of scientists and technicians, and in the academic population in general have forced not only those who must cope with the literature but also those who are responsible for the investment in research itself, to recognize the role played by the literature and its handlers in the scientsc advance-ment of the nation and the improvement of man’s environment. Accurate counts are not available of the numbers of primary journa