Overlap in the lists of journals monitored by Biosis, CAS, and EI

Abstract

In April 1970, the BioSciences Information Service of Biological Abstracts, the Chemical Abstracts Service, and Engineering Index, Inc. began a five-part study to determine the relationships between and the overlap in coverage in their printed publications and computerreadable services. This study was designed to provide information needed by these three accessing services for planning future cooperative programs and for reconciling differences in policies and practices so as to make their publications and services more useful toIn April 1970, the BioSciences iformation Service of Biological Abstracts (BIOSIS) , the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), and Engineering Index, Inc. (Ei) announced a joint five-part study with the following objectives: .To determine the amount of overlap among the lists of primary journals each of the services regularly monitors. 2.To find out how the same journal articles are selected for analysis by more than one of the three services. 3. To study differences in the editorial policies and procedures employed by the three services as they relate to the form, the format, and the content of bibliographic descriptions and abstracts.

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

“…The report of phase 1 (Wood, et al, 1972a) stated that of the total of 14,592 journals monitored by the three services only 1% was monitored by all three, 27% by two out of the three, and 72% were monitored by only one of the services. Phase 1 only analyzed titles but the subsequent phases covered both titles and article overlap.…”

“…It was conducted by Bearman under the auspices of the National Federation of Abstracting and Indexing Services (NFAIS) and employed much of the initial work of Wood et al (1972aWood et al ( , 1973. This study covered the overlap among 14 major secondary services including Chemical Abstracts, Biological Abstracts, and Engineering Index, which may partially explain why the full tripartite study was not completed.…”

“…To correct for the bias in data collection caused by the differing number of journals scanned by each service Bearman applied a weighting factor to each overlap value based on the number of journals scanned by each given service. The sampling techniques used to generate the raw data were less precise than those used by Wood et al (1972aWood et al ( , 1973 because of the much larger number of intersections (91 versus 3) present with 14 sources. An overall overlap percentage and overlap percentages for each service were then computed.…”

“…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.…”