New Developments in Biological Abstracting And Indexing

CURRENT ISSUES 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 literature 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 secondary announcement media, In data graphed by Conrad,l the ratio between primary journals and abstracting services has decreased steadily 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 interdisciplinary nature of scientific research and technological development. There is a growing interdependence between those doing research in the life sciences and those working in the physical sciences and mathematics.