Annual Review of Biochemistry 1948 [antikvár]

It is interesting to reflect upon the future of scientific publications. The second edition of the World List, published in 1934, listed 36,000 scientific periodicals. Fifteen thousand of these were classified by Bradford as useful, the remainder as containing papers of less importance. The 15,000 were publishing in 1934 at the rate of 750,000 good or fair papers per year. According to E. W. Hulme the yearly average of papers in the pure sciences was close to 3,100 for the period 1800-1863, rising to about 22,600 for the period 1874-1900 and to 85,500 in 1910. The implications of these data are sobering, not only because of the perplexities that now confront the reader, the publisher, and the librarian, but because of the exponential nature of the growth of scientific literature: future generations will find themselves buried in paper and entombed in libraries unless paper pulp reserves run out or somé sensible solution to the problem is found. The abstracting and reviewing services in the sciences obviously call for study. The abstracting services, guilty incidentally of much duplication of effort, have greatly increased, but their coverage of "good" and "very fair" papers shortly before the war barely exceeded one third of the 750,000 originál papers. The effects of the Six-Year War on scientific publications have escaped a satisfactory appraisal but, despite the unfortunate demise of somé journals, we would be greatly surprised if the world totals of papers and journals for 1948 were not considerably greater than those for 1934. While the consumers of this inundating flood of papers have increased, the number of journals awaiting perusal by a diligent reader in any of the sciences has increased-so alsó the abstracts over which he must pore if his avidity is still unquenchable. It has been our hope that in these A nnual Reviews our colleagues in Biochemistry, Physiology, and Microbiology would receive somé relief through a sort of "predigestion" process. The increases in papers and in journals, however, have imposed their problems upon the reviewer and the publisher as well. The reader has been asked, even from the first, to accept critical appraisals of the subjects of his interest rather than comprehensive reviews of the synoptic type. The reviewers have been asked by our editors to screen the literature even more severely, if need be to review but a fraction of the papers of the preceding year or biennium. Recent volumes