title: Fifty years of the Index to Dental Literature: a critical appraisal.
abstract: The year 1971 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Index to Dental Literature. The Index had a slow and stormy birth, with twenty-three years of hard work put in until the first volume was issued. The first Index is described and the changes in its contents and format are traced through the years until its production in 1965 by the National Library of Medicine. The current Index is analyzed with attention paid to nomenclature, classification scheme, quality of the index entries and cross references. The results of a survey of regular users of the Index are interpreted, and suggestions gleaned for the improvement of this most useful tool in dental research.
mesh_terms: D000043:Abstracting and Indexing / Q000266:history*; D003813:Dentistry; D049673:History, 20th Century; D007256:Information Systems; D009317:National Library of Medicine (U.S.); D010506:Periodicals as Topic; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D014481:United States