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This issue attempts to provide a general background for exploring the increasingly complex world of abstracting and indexing services. It is also an indication of the involvement of libraries in the total development of abstracting and indexing services. The first paper by Adams and Baker discusses one of the basic problems in this area which is the proper structuring of subjects, for inclusion in any service. The relationship between ‘discipline’‐and ‘mission’‐oriented services is covered, and in this chapter a common base is reached for future discussion. The National Federation of Science Abstracting and Indexing Services appears to have collapsed into a fairly passive role, but the editor has presented some informative notes which can act as a basis for a more definitive report. Stella Keenan provides a valuable contribution to the background of abstracting and indexing services in the physical sciences and Louise Schultz discusses new developments in the area of the biological sciences, demonstrating the complexities of providing access in a specialized scientific area. The paper by Tate and Wood is entitled ‘Libraries and Abstracting and Indexing Services—a study in interdependency’. Although, based primarily on their experiences at ‘Chemical Abstracts’, they bring out the relationship between libraries and specialized services. Another introduction to the Science Citation Index is given by Morton Malin, from the Institute for Scientific Information, bringing out the interests of librarians in this new indexing tool. Charles Bernier discusses the procedures and problems of production of subject indexes, based on his own extensive experience. He covers problems of term selection and correction in addition to the physical preparation of copy. James Wood, Head Librarian of Chemical Abstracts Service, proposes a co‐operative venture between librarians and abstracts producers in a comprehensive list of periodicals for chemistry and chemical engineering. The final paper by Andrew Aimes, senior officer of the COSATI staff, gives general guidelines and information basic to the theory behind national information systems, referring to the ‘System Study of Abstracting and Indexing in the United States’, prepared by SDC under contract to COSATI.

Classification, indexing and abstracting can all be regarded as summarisations of the content of a document. A model of text comprehension by indexers (including classifiers and abstractors) is presented, based on task descriptions which indicate that the comprehension of text for indexing differs from normal fluent reading in respect of: operational time constraints, which lead to text being scanned rapidly for perceptual cues to aid gist comprehension; comprehension being task oriented rather than learning oriented, and being followed immediately by the production of an abstract, index, or classification; and the automaticity of processing of text by experienced indexers working within a restricted range of text types. The evidence for the interplay of perceptual and conceptual processing of text under conditions of rapid scanning is reviewed. The allocation of mental resources to text processing is discussed, and a cognitive process model of abstracting, indexing and classification is described.

Librarians increasingly encounter decisions related to the use and/or purchase of an expanding body of bibliographic databases. This article examines the coverage of anthropology literatures in major academic indexes widely available in electronic format. Eight databases were selected for comparison, including three subject‐specific indexes, two multidisciplinary social sciences indexes, and three general academic indexes. Indexes were compared for their coverage of a core list of 135 anthropology journals as well as journals relevant to anthropology in other social science disciplines. In addition to journal coverage, several index characteristics were also compared: years of coverage; timeliness; extent of indexing; record structure; search software; and availability of controlled vocabulary, abstracts and full text. It is concluded that each database has relative merits and weaknesses and that these multiple factors must be considered within the context of local conditions in order to determine which database products are appropriate for meeting local information needs.

This article reviews the state of the art in automatic indexing, that is, automatic techniques for analysing and characterising documents, for manipulating their descriptions in searching, and for generating the index language used for these purposes. It concentrates on the literature from 1968 to 1973. Section I defines the topic and its context. Sections II and III consider work in syntax and semantics respectively in detail. Section IV comments on ‘indirect’ indexing. Section V briefly surveys operating mechanized systems. In Section VI major experiments in automatic indexing are reviewed, and Section VII attempts an overall conclusion on the current state of automatic indexing techniques.

The purpose of this article is to discuss open access to scholarly indexing/abstracting information.

Discusses open access to scholarly indexing/abstracting information.

Open access versions of the traditional ready reference tools cannot always substitute for the commercial, subscription‐based indexing/abstracting databases, but they can complement them.

The paper offers insights into scholarly indexing/abstracting.

In a previous paper (J. Doc. 20 (4) 1964, 212–35) a series of tests on the coverage, overlap, and indexing of abstracts journals were described. Briefly, these were carried out by selecting recent, comprehensive bibliographies on specific subjects, searching the appropriate abstracts journals via the author indexes to determine the number of references given in the bibliography that were abstracted, then consulting the subject indexes to try to locate those references which are known to have been abstracted. A further eight bibliographies have been studied, and the results are reported here.

A survey of abstracting policies used by producers of bibliographic databases examined abstracting guidelines which aim to enhance free‐text retrieval. Of the 123 database policies examined, fifty‐seven (46 per cent) included such instructions. Editors consider content of abstracts and their language as a primary factor in retrieval enhancement. Most recommend that once abstractors decide which concepts to include in abstracts and in which form to represent them, these terms should be co‐ordinated with index terms assigned from a controlled vocabulary. Guidelines about the type of abstracts, i.e., informative or indicative, and about their length are not affected by the capability of free‐text retrieval.

UNESCO is instructed by its constitution to ‘Maintain, increase and diffuse knowledge … by initiating methods of international co‐operation calculated to give the peoples of all countries access to the printed and published materials produced by any of them’. As one of the methods of carrying out this function the programmes of Unesco both for 1947 and 1948 specifically included plans to ‘facilitate the improvement of scientific documentation and abstracting’, and an Expert Committee on Scientific Abstracting was called together at Unesco House in Paris during the 7th, 8th, and 9th of April 1948, under the joint authority of the Libraries and Natural Science sections, for preliminary work in connexion with an international conference to be held at a later date.

Many retrieval experiments have been based on inadequate test collections, and current research is hampered by the lack of proper collections. This short review does not attempt a fully documented survey of all the collections used in the past decade: hopefully representative examples have been studied to throw light on the requirements test collections should meet, to show how past collections have been defective, and to suggest guidelines for a future ‘ideal’ test collection. The specifications for this collection can be taken as an indirect comment on our present state of knowledge of major retrieval system variables, and experience in conducting experiments.

This paper is concerned with the purpose of functions of abstracting and abstracting services, touching on indexing only in relation to the indexing of abstracts, and concentrating mainly on ‘hard copy’ printed services. It is presented from the viewpoint of both a producer of an abstracting service and a user of other peoples' abstracting services.