摘要：Across the land, when a librarian sits down for a cup of coffee with a research man, the conversation inevitably turns these days to the problems posed by the expanding literature of science, the number of new journals, the increasing time required for even cursory information searches, and the sense of hopelessness with which the busy doctor or researcher tries to "keep up with the literature." Chemical Abstracts included 6,361 separate journals in its 1956 "List of Periodicals Abstracted," and Tom Keys' new manual reports that the National Library of Medicine is now checking in 11,800 periodicals. The sheer bulk seems overwhelming; the complexity of the indexing and abstracting problem seems to be increasing with no end in sight.
