Online Databases: Celebrating A&I Longevity

Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. Only the H.W. Wilson Co., at 108, has created an older abstracting and indexing tool. Despite the phenomenal developments in technology in the 20th century, abstracting and indexing (A&I) databases remain a core scholarly service.

The continuing necessity of abstracts has been questioned, but recent studies show just how important they remain to scholarly readers (see Link List). At least one-third of all instances when an article is read or downloaded involve abstracts alone or abstracts plus the full texts.

To remain relevant, A&I services in the last decade have had to make major enhancements. Continual pressures—including competition from free web search engines, the escalating costs of keeping up with human-based indexing of proliferating journal articles, and customer desires for online system interconnections and bells and whistles—have arguably made this past ten years more challenging than the 90 before.

Ulrich's™ Periodicals Directory now lists 218,800 active periodicals. Wilson uses librarian committees to help select the titles for its indexes, which include both peer-reviewed (refereed) and other journals. Wilson decides what a peer-reviewed title is rather than relying on the designation by a secondary source such as Ulrich's™.

Specialist databases include selected titles relevant to their topical specialty from the smaller subset of scholarly journals. Of all active periodicals, 60,000 are scholarly and 23,600 are refereed/peer-reviewed.

Donald W. King, professor at the School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, and I have been tracking the average number of issues per year and articles per issue. Both have increased over time: the number of issues per year for scholarly journals was 6.6 in 1977, up to 11 in 2001. At the same time, the annual number of articles per title increased from 86 to 154 and total pages from 832 to 2,215.

Many specialist databases also must index conference proceedings, patents, and other specialized documents. This year, CAS has indexed more literature than ever before.

The dramatic increase in CAplus records results not only from more journal articles. Matthew J. Toussant, CAS senior VP of editorial operations, notes that “patents are now the leading source of new substance information in the CAS REGISTRY database and accounted for 63 percent of new substance records by CAS in 2006.”

This year, additions to the CA databases include utility model patents from the State Intellectual Property Office of the People's Republic of China; bibliographic data and abstracts for patent applications from the Indian Patent Office within 14 days of publication; French- and German-language abstracts in basic patents from the European Patent Office; and more timely indexing of Korean patent records.

A&I services also have been busy digitizing their paper records from the era before online access. All Chemical Abstracts records back to Vol. 1 (1907) are available online. This year, U.S patent records from 1870 to 1889 were added to the oldest segment of the CA/CAplus databases. H.W. Wilson's Readers' Guide Retrospective includes indexing records of articles from 1890.

The old articles are historically and culturally fascinating; also, scholars don't have an excuse to overlook relevant research from the past. Wilson retains the original historical indexing terms—an exercise in cultural history itself.

It has become the norm this decade to digitize old articles and indexing records. Emerald, a scholarly journal publisher celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2007, is marking the occasion by digitizing its entire full-text article inventory from the first volumes of all of its journals, with help from the British Library.

Emerald joins Nature and other publishers and A&I services in celebrating their entire past by digitizing it and making it available online.