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OCR for page 407
COMMUNICATION IN THE LIFE SCIENCES
efforts to promote both interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary understand-
ing and progress?
Federal agencies support both research and information services; how-
ever, this support occurs by independent mechanisms with no direct
coupling and feedback. The present chapter will not offer specific recom-
mendations for overhaul of the biological information services network,
but will examine it from the standpoint of working biologists and offer some
guiding philosophy.
SPECIAL PROBLEMS IN HANDLING BIOLOGICAL INFORMATION
While biologists, physicists, and chemists face similar problems in handling
rapidly expanding information, and while all disciplines recognize the need
for structured systems of information handling, storage, and retrieval, spe-
cial needs arise within each discipline. For biologists, the overwhelming
volume of published material is a special problem. Of the 26,000 distinct
scientific and technical journals published annually, the life sciences claim
no less than 50 percent (20 percent for agnculture, 13 percent for medical
sciences, 4 percent for basic life sciences, and 10 percent for technology),
or 13,000 serial publications. Not only are individual scientists obviously
unable to deal with this plethora; libraries and abstracting services are
inundated by it. It is important, therefore, to ask how much of this volume
is critical. Biological Abstracts,* in 1968, abstracted 7,400 periodicals, yet
most of these are unlikely to publish truly significant new findings that will
materially advance the progress of science. Indeed, it is possible to identify
about 1,000 journals in which more than 90 percent of the truly significant
original work in biology now appears.
Another special problem in biological information springs from the
diversity of subject matter and of experimental approaches to understanding
the living world. Thus, biology encompasses explorations of subcellular
organization, of organisms from viruses and bacteria through the primates,
of highly complex communities and ecosystems, from the kinetics of a
chemical reaction to the behavior of populations. This diversity is reflected
in the 20 major program categories the National Science Foundation finds
necessary for biology, compared with four for chemistry and 10 for physics.
The information needs of the individual working scientist, whose interests
lie mainly within one of these 20 categories, are largely satisfied within
5 to 10 percent of the 1,000 journals mentioned above. For the rest, he is
Biological A bstracts. BioSciences Information Service of Biological Abstracts.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 1926.
407
Representative terms from entire chapter:
information services
