A COMPARISON OF TWO ABSTRACTING SERVICES FOR SURGICAL LITERATURE, AND SOME FACTORS IN THE COMPARISON OF ABSTRACTING AND INDEXING SERVICES
| Pages | 193-200 |
| Published date | 01 April 1954 |
| Date | 01 April 1954 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb026208 |
| Author | A. NEELAMEGHAN |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
A COMPARISON OF TWO ABSTRACTING
SERVICES FOR SURGICAL LITERATURE,
AND SOME FACTORS IN THE
COMPARISON OF ABSTRACTING AND
INDEXING SERVICES
by A. NEELAMEGHAN1
Librarian,
Madras Medical
College,
India
THE
suspension of some of the great German medical abstracting services
during World War II and the keenly felt need for a comprehensive abstract-
ing service in English, particularly for clinical medicine, brought about the
establishment of
Excerpta Medica
as a non-profit organization in 1947. Since
its inception the service has expanded into several sections covering not only
the usual divisions of clinical and preclinical medicine but also subjects like
Cancer and Tuberculosis which are of present-day interest and importance.
Now that some of the German abstracting services have been revived there
is apt to be some amount of duplication between them and
Excerpta
Medica,
and the small library in particular has to evaluate them to get the best for the
money or the most suitable for its purposes.
In the comparison of abstracting journals we are interested particularly in
comprehensiveness of coverage (number of journals scrutinized and number
of articles abstracted), recency of articles abstracted, frequency of publication
of the abstracting journal, language of the abstracts to suit the users (especially
when the abstracting journals are used by readers themselves), and, to a cer-
tain extent, the format, indexes to the abstracts (form and frequency), con-
sistency in the citation of references, &c. A comparison of the services by
subject fields, neither too broad nor too narrow, is of interest to the specialist
and sectional or departmental libraries in judging their adequacy in the field,
and it also brings to light some of the complexities involved in the comparison
of abstracting services. Before describing the study of two abstracting ser-
vices for surgery, some of the factors which make it difficult to say that one
service is better than another on all counts for all purposes may be examined.
Considering the physical and mechanical processes involved in the pub-
lishing of abstracting journals, in a particular subject division, services like
Excerpta
Medica,
or the German ones which attempt to cover the whole of
medicine, are likely to be more comprehensive
as
far
as the
number of journals
scrutinized is concerned than a service devoted to that particular field alone
which is likely to confine itself to journals devoted to that and closely related
fields.
(For instance, the 738 different journals cited by
Excerpta
Medica,
Section IX [Surgery], during the period January to December 1952 fall into
almost every division and subdivision of the medical sciences plus veterinary
medicine and general science; during the same period
Zentrahrgan
für die
1 Recipient of the Medical Library Association Fellowship for 1953-4.
193
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