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The Primary Communications Research Centre started its life at the University of Leicester in 1976, closing down ten years later in 1986. Its objective — to study all aspects of primary communication — was unique at the time. This retrospective survey by the Project Head looks at the thinking behind the foundation of the Centre and assesses its activities.

In response to questions by Buxton and Meadows, there was an examination of the occurrence of title words in the abstracts, first paragraphs, last paragraphs and cited titles of research papers in chemistry, economics, history, mathematics and philosophy for the 1960 and 1970 eras. Title word occurrence in first paragraphs varied little among disciplines. Last paragraphs tended to have most frequent occurrence of title words in history and philosophy, and cited titles had most frequent occurrence in chemistry and mathematics. There was no significant difference between chemistry and mathematics of occurrence in abstracts; abstracts were not available for the other disciplines. Among disciplines taken as a whole, the best reflection of title word occurrence was the collection of abstracts, followed in order by first paragraphs, last paragraphs and cited titles. First and last paragraphs together provided 70% to 80% of the title words. For most disciplines, longer than average titles did demonstrate a higher frequency of title word occurrence in first and last paragraphs than did titles in general. The results implied that indexing based on extraction of title words could employ similar procedures from discipline to discipline. Nevertheless, sensitive information retrieval systems should be prepared for changes in the vocabulary of fields like history and philosophy to occur possibly more slowly than in fields like mathematics and chemistry.

One of the tasks of the special librarian is to facilitate current awareness: services are set up to encourage user groups to keep up‐to‐date with developments in their own and related subject areas. The librarian advocates current awareness as an essential prerequisite for members of that user group to remain effective practitioners, researchers or teachers within their subject area. The librarian encourages and advocates because unfortunately some of those practitioners, researchers and teachers are either unconvinced of the need for current awareness or haven't the time/are not interested/cannot be bothered.

The Primary Communications Research Centre (PCRC) was established at the University of Leicester on 1 July, 1976 by a grant from the British Library Research and Development Department; full scale operation began in October, 1976. Project Head is Professor A. J. Meadows, and the Centre has both a Project Advisory Committee and a Management Committee.

The paper attempts to provide an outline account of the development and context of scientific and technical communication during the twentieth century. The main channels and forms of communication are reviewed, and their changing contributions to the overall pattern of information flow. The ever‐increasing volume and diversity of scientific and technical information are emphasised. The paper concludes with some reflections on what may be learnt from this history.

Anonymous peer review is an important part of the process by which academic information is evaluated. Some of the problems associated with the process are discussed below. Although the history of peer review is well documented, there appears to be no record of when it became anonymous. Since most criticisms associated with the practice result from the anonymity of referees, this is significant. A number of well‐known and long‐established journals were approached in an attempt to determine when they adopted the process but none of the correspondents at the journals knew.

The earlier work by Buxton and Meadows, reporting the changes in information content of the titles of research papers in eleven different periodicals between 1947 and 1973, has been updated to 1984. Significant increases since 1973 were found for the Lancet and Economica. The British Journal of Sociology shows a significant increase since 1950. No significant changes were found for any period in Philosophy.

The term ‘obsolescence’ occurs frequently in the literature of librarianship and information science. In numerous papers we are told how most published literature becomes obsolete within a measurable time, and that an item receives half the uses it will ever receive (‘half‐life’) in a few years. ‘Obsolescence’ is however very rarely defined, and its validity, interest, and practical value are often assumed rather than explained. Before reviewing studies on ‘obsolescence’, therefore, it is necessary to look at the concept and to identify the reasons why it should be of interest.