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OCR for page 424
424 THE LIFE SCIENCES
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each article abstracts specifically designed to be informative when di-
vorced from the text readers and abstracting services would profit. While
~ mung up.. Jouma~s now require such abstracts, only 30 percent of
world biological journals demand them, and many are inadequate.
The storage and retrieval function storage of references to publica-
tions in a form suitable for rapid retrieval yet permitting browsing in de-
fined fields of interest. This service is now provided by the tapes of the
National Library of Medicine and the National Agricultural Library, the
former for some 7,000 journals. Biological Abstracts has adopted a com-
puterized indexing service, based on extraction by its staff of relevant in-
formation obtained from publication titles. Speed is the most appealing
feature of this procedure, though the subtlety and refinement of the con-
ventional index is lost. The process would be much improved if editors or
authors supplied amplifying key words, since it is often impossible to
include all useful clues in titles of reasonable length.
The alerting or current-awareness function to announce the appear-
ance of a document of potential value to individuals or groups in special-
ized areas of research. At present, formidable costs preclude the distribution
of selected abstracts on a routine basis to such groups, but the Institute
for Scientific Information is developing working programs for routine
distribution of selected references (titles plus bibliographic details). How-
ever, the personal element will remain overriding. As long as printed jour-
nals retain their primacy in scientific communication, the taste and
judgment of the individual scientist will continue to determine which papers
to read and which to discard. Every scientist has found useful gems of
information in surprising places, and has been sorely disappointed by the
content of papers with rather grandiosely promising titles. At any rate,
structured information systems do not offer a substitute for either the utility
or the pleasures of browsing.
SPECIALIZED INFORMATION CENTERS
For some fields of biology, particularly the taxonomic sciences, coverage of
the major primary journals, which may yield 85 percent of the significant
information, is not enough. In these cases, specialized services should be
encouraged to provide access to literature in highly limited journals, with a
deliberate attempt to include the more expensive last 10 percent of the
information. Centers providing services of this type can flourish only if
they are in contact with active research and are staked in part by active
scientists competent to grasp changing aspects of their fields and to provide
Representative terms from entire chapter:
permitting browsing
