A comparison of the currency of secondary information sources in the biomedical literature. I. Weekly current awareness services.
Three biomedical current awareness products which are distributed on floppy disc, were studied over a period of 3 months. They were monitored for the speed with which primary journal issues were indexed, and for the coverage of the journals which were selected for study. Data on issues of 72 monthly journals (38 North American and 34 European) and nine weekly titles (four from North America and five from Europe) were recorded. The time to elapse between publication date and arrival of hard copy in the British libraries and appearance in secondary sources varied enormously. The findings suggest that monthly journal issues appear in the secondary sources on average 6-7 weeks after publication date and weekly journals appear after approximately 4 weeks. Indexing of North American monthly journals is 1 week ahead of European titles in the two products from the US, but the European service indexed European publications sooner. One product, Current Contents on Diskette, contained all issues included in the 3-month period covered by the study, but Reference Update omitted 9.1% of the issues and Medical Science Weekly 1.6%, including leading biomedical journals.
Grainger
F
F
Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology, London.
Lyon
E
E
D000043:Abstracting and Indexing; D016250:Compact Disks / Q000592:standards; D003625:Data Collection; D016206:Databases, Bibliographic / Q000592:standards* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D004526:Efficiency; D005069:Evaluation Studies as Topic; D007221:Industry / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D007993:Libraries, Medical; D007999:Library Services / Q000592:standards* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D010506:Periodicals as Topic / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D013997:Time Factors; D006113:United Kingdom