Coordination-A Detailed Review of the Relationships among the Publications and Services of BIOSIS, CAS, and Ei

Abstract

The symposium papers which follow are an outgrowth of a previous paper1 by the author in which the duplication of efforts in the area of physicochemical property data handling was pointed out, and the need for cooperative efforts was stressed.The need for cooperative efforts is even more strongly indicated by some recent work by the author and Steven Hildrich (unpublished work) in which a random sample of 145 abstracts of journal articles in Chemical Abstracts was checked for duplicate processing in several other abstracting and indexing services. Preliminary results indicate that the intellectual effort of processing these articles is repeated for better than half the cases by another abstracting and indexing service. Extrapolating these preliminary results to the total volume of publication in Chemical Abstracts, and using conservative figures for costs and time spent in quality abstracting alone leads to a total expenditure in duplicate costs of roughly two million dollars annually, and in duplicate time of 75 man-years annually.Considering the present climate of economic belt-tightening and the lack of good information personnel, such duplication of effort is unforgivable. The papers that follow were chosen to be representative of the present laudable efforts to eliminate some of the processing duplication in various areas of chemistry by cooperation, or to detail how cooperative effort has led to a more useable product. These examples of cooperation in the areas of abstracting and indexing (the first paper by C. M. Flanagan), information storage and retrieval systems (the next three papers by S. J. Martinez, S. A. Rossmassler, and P.Urbach, respectively), and structural data handling (the last two papers by C. E. Granito and W. J. Wiswesser et al.) are encouraging developments in working toward the ultimate goal of the most efficient processing of information to make maximum use of money and talent available to the information community.LITERATURE CITED announced a joint five-part study w i t h the following objectives: t o determine the amount of overlap among the lists of primary journals each of the services regularly monitors, t o find out h o w the same journal articles are selected for analysis, t o study differences i n the editorial policies and procedures employed by the three services, t o measure the degree of compatability or interconvertibility of the computer-readable files of each of the services, and to determine the similarities and differences of indexing policies. This paper reports the findings of the first t w o parts of this study.

A review of journal coverage overlap with an extension to the definition of overlap

“…Begun in April, 1970(Flanagan, 1973Larson, Bernard, & Padin, 1976;Wood, Flanagan, & Kennedy, 1972a, 1972b, this study was originally designed to be executed in five phases:…”

“…Comparing printed or online records is still not easily done. The key problem of nonstandard citations described earlier (Doszkocs, 1977;Flanagan, 1973;Wood et al, 1972aWood et al, , 1973) is still present in spite of the vast increases in computer speed and storage capacity. It is hoped that citation record standards in conjunction with other communication standards will provide a sufficient platform to allow ready comparison of citation databases.…”