Viii. General Issues 20. Scientometric Analysis of Science and Technology Bibliographic Information Sources with Regard to Genus Salvia

Researchers have been, for the past decades, facing an ever accelerating growth of all kinds of scientific and technical information. With the advent of electronic technologies and especially the Internet the data flow has turned into a deluge. This is affecting especially interdisciplinary fields. It has gradually become impossible to even follow the distribution of relevant information let alone to study such infor mation. Information is scattered across many “meta” sources. Moreover, the same information is being stored differently in different sources so it cannot be retrieved by using common search strategy. As storage systems and meta sources grow so do the strategies. End-users are increasingly at a loss as to which sources to turn to in order to retrieve as much relevant information as possible. Kuhlthau (1997) admits that, while all users sustain some degree of anxiety, such anxiety or sense of frustration is even much higher with those who are involved with interdisciplinary sciences. The field of medicinal plants is in its characteristics a typical interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary (crossdisciplinary) field within the life sciences. It is composed of agricultural, biomedical, biological, chemical and other aspects. Many times it implies also cultural and social dimensions so end-users must expect such information to be scattered across variety of disciplines and pertaining information sources. We cannot in detail present all the sources where such information might appear. We will introduce only some major life-sciences databases where information is presented in bibliographic way, that is on the level of title, informative abstract, keywords and publication data. Bibliographic databases still represent by far the most important source of science and technology information. Data in such databases are organized in a systematic manner so it is possible to study well the scatter of information. To some extent bibliographic data on medicinal plants were studied by Gupta (1990) who investigated subject-based publication activity indicators for medicinal and aromatic plants established from Indian Medicinal and Aromatic Plants Abstracts. Zhang (1994) studied distribution of Chinese traditional medicine references in Medline database. In our study we will identify most major bibliographic life-sciences databases and assess them as pertinent sources for information on the genus Salvia. On the example of Salvia we will observe the degree