Describes a survey of 33 British, French, German, and U.S. abstract journals that examined their coverage of patent specifications. The standards for the identification of patent documents developed by the World Intellectual Property Organization are discussed, and an appendix provides a listing of the patent coverage by the country of each…

Concludes that cluster analysis is an unsuitable approach to the design of secondary services in the social sciences, although it may have some value in automatic retrieval systems. (Author/VT)

Recent discussion of Bradford's law of scatter has been founded on two formulations that are not mathematically equivalent. A method of comparing the two formulations against empirical data is developed, and the results using four sets of existing data are discussed. (12 references) (Author/NH)

A ranking list of biochemistry periodicals was prepared on the basis of citations in the Annual Review of Biochemistry'' for 1968-70. This list brings out the predominant position of biochemical research in the total scientific effort today, and the increasing bias of cognate disciplines towards biochemical methodologies. (7 references)…

The literature of librarianship and documentation is evaluated concentrating on the periodicals looking toward a worldwide system for bibliographical control. (20 references) (Author/NH)

Methods for ranking journals to describe the cost effectiveness of journal acquisition are explored. (PF)

It is shown that there is no ambiguity in Bradford's theory of distribution. Starting with two basic postulates laid down by Bradford, a mathematical expression is derived such that its curve agrees with the experimentally plotted data for periodicals in fields of applied geophysics and lubrication. Five references are listed. (Author/EJS)

A continuation of the November 1969-March 1970 survey, this paper outlines why certain information about readers' failure would be useful, how this information was collected, survey results, and general conclusions. (The first survey appeared in Journal of Documentation'' v27, p273-286, 1971.) (1 reference) (Author/NH)

The proposition is examined that large-scale photocopying, such as that practiced by the British Library Lending Division, affects the sales of journals. It is concluded that economic difficulties experienced by journal publishers and the increased demand on the BLLD are unrelated, though both owe something to the economic pressure on libraries.…

Reports the results of a study that analyzed citations from 140 journals and 148 monographs in social science fields. Data presented in the article's 10 tables include date distributions, forms of material cited, subject distributions, countries of publication cited, and rank order of journals cited. (JD)

An analysis of the acknowledgments accompanying scholarly articles in 4 information and library science journals over a 20-year period showed that a small number of individuals are acknowledged frequently whereas most individuals are infrequently acknowledged. A positive correlation between frequency of acknowledgments and citations was found.…

The research reported suggests some ways in which economists could help themselves by rationalizing their literature, making better use of the bibliographic tools in existence and improving these tools. Ways librarians could do more to assist their readers are specified. (10 references) (Author/NH)

Compliance with International Standardization Organization (ISO) standards for the presentation of periodical publications was evaluated in 221 Spanish biomedical journals to determine the degree to which the standards are actually used, and to develop recommendations for improving standards and increasing familiarity with them among authors,…

Demonstrates, with an example, a relatively simple method for fitting Bradford's law to empirical data to estimate the number of journals and articles in a subject collection. An exact discrete formulation illustrates Bradford's law as a special case of the Zipf-Mandlebrot "rank frequency" law. (Author/RAA)