To operate effectively, libraries must develop methods by which to identify literatures of high utility to their clientele and must acquire and organize these literatures in such a way as to optimize their usefulness. One such method, the bibliometric approach, is based on the assumption of certain regularities in patterns of authorship,…

A series of five runs comprised of 20 searches each were carried out in a three-year span of the INSPEC data base. The same queries were processed manually in the corresponding volumes of Science Abstracts, and comparison of the output of each search method exposed reasons for the failures. Emphasis is laid on the fact that a query comprises other…