TY - JOUR
AU - EDWARDS, PHYLLIS I.
AB -  PHYLLIS I. EDWARDS, F.L.S. British Museum (Natural History), Cromwell Road, London, S .W.7 T h e total number of serials published in the life sciences is unknown but Biological Abstracts Service scan some 7000 serials and the Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux some 8000. The number of articles published in the life sciences would exceed 400,000 in any one year. T h e literature explosion is greatly aggravated by the number of times the same information is repackaged for presentation in different journals without notification of the fact. Duplication also occurs at the retrieval end of the information transfer. The same paper is not only abstracted by several services, some comprehensive and others reader orientated, but also by services covering the same field, e.g. the English language services Abstracts of entomology (BIOSIS) ; Entomology abstracts (Information Retrieval Ltd.) and the Insecta Section of the Zoological record (Zoological Society of London). This type of situation is most unsatisfactory. Most libraries cannot afford to subscribe to all three services and research workers certainly do not have the time to search them. This fact has obviously been recognized by those who work in the agricultural sciences. Sir Thomas Scrivenor explains in his paper 
TI - The general pattern of biological information
JF - Biological Journal of the Linnean Society
DO - 10.1111/j.1095-8312.1971.tb00177.x
DA - 1971-09-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-general-pattern-of-biological-information-yC6nVn0CVB
SP - 169
VL - 3
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -