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The dissemination of experimental materials, instruments, and methods is central to the progress of research in genetics. In recent years, competition for research funding and intellectual property issues have increasingly presented barriers to the dissemination of this "research-related information. "Information gathered in interviews with experimental geneticists and analysis of acknowledgment patterns in published genetics research are used to construct a series of basic scenarios for the exchange of genetic materials and research methods. The discussion focuses on factors affecting individuals' behavior and expectations as information requesters and information providers.

The Web is revolutionizing the entire scholarly communication process and changing the way that researchers exchange information. In this paper, we analyze two views of information production and use in computer-related research based on citation analysis of PDF and Postcript formatted publications on the Web using autonomous citation indexing (ACI), and a parallel citation analysis of the journal literature indexed by the Institute for Scienti®c Information (ISI) in SCISEARCH. Our goal is to establish a baseline pro®le of computer science``literature'' as it appears in the published journals and as it appears on the publicly available Web. From this starting point, we hope to identify additional research areas dealing with information dissemination and citation practices in computer science and the utility of autonomous citation indexing on the Web as an adjunct to commercial indexing Ó

It is generally assumed that cocitation studies of specialties and fields yield valid representations of intellec. tual structure. To test the validity of this assumption, 5-6 years aggregate cocitation data for 41 authors in macroeconomics and 49 authors in Drosophila genetics (the genetics of fruit flies) were compared with independent judgments of inter-author similarity collected from 14 macroeconomists and 15 geneticists via a card-sort. ing technique. Non-metric multidimensional scaling (ALSCAL), and Johnson's "smallest diameter" cluster. ing were used to create two-dimensional cluster-en. hanced maps. Congruence between maps of cocitations and similarity judgments was assessed using canonical correlation of the spatial coordinates of points (authors) in each of a given pair of maps. Two sig nificant canonical correlations were found in each test. The majority of clusters appeared in both cocitation and judgment maps. In macroeconomics, differences be. tween maps and clusters represent the influence, on judgments, of individual authors' perceived policy ori. entation. In Drosophila genetics, major differences arise from a time lag in the incorporation of authors' re. cent work in the formal literature. Cocited author map. ping is a valid representation of the intellectual structure in both macroeconomics and Drosophila genetics.

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Search results for nine topics in the Medical Behavioral Sciences are reanalyzed to compare the overall performance of descriptor and citation search strategies in identifying relevant and novel documents. Overlap percentages between an aggregate "descriptor-based" database (MEDLINE, EXCERPTA MEDICA, PSYCINFO) and an aggregate "citation-based" database (SCISEARCH, SOCIAL SCISEARCH) ranged from 1% to 26%, with a median overlap of 8% relevant retrievals found using both search strategies. For seven topics in which both descriptor and citation strategies produced reasonably substantial retrievals, two patterns of search performance and novelty distribution were observed: 1) Where descriptor and citation retrieval showed little overlap, novelty retrieval percentages differed by 17-23% between the two strategies; 2) Topics with a relatively high percentage retrieval overlap showed little difference (1-4%) in descriptor and citation novelty retrieval percentages. These results reflect the varying partial congruence of two literature networks and represent two different types of subject relevance.