THE BIOLOGICAL LITERATURE 23 



By way of example, the Johns Hopkins University annually sponsors 

 a symposium on some biological topic, and then publishes the proceed- 

 ings of this meeting. Their recent symposium on the various effects of 

 light on organisms has been a particularly valuable summary of current 

 thinking. 



Abstract services 



Since no one can hope to read every issue of every periodical, some 

 system for keeping up with the literature becomes essential. The vari- 

 ous abstract services perform this function quite well. 



An abstract is a one-paragrah summary of a technical paper. It may 

 be written by the author of the paper or by some other scientist familiar 

 with the field who uses the technical paper as his source of information. 

 So that any reader can find the original paper if he chooses, the abstract 

 lists the title, authors, the periodical with volume and page numbers, 

 and the date of publication. Ideally the abstract should include all the 

 information contained in the original paper, but to compress several 

 or many pages into one paragraph without loss of information would 

 take extremely careful writing. This ideal is approached but never 

 attained. 



The biologist depends upon Biological Abstracts, a periodical which 

 presents abstracts of a very large segment of the world's new biological 

 literature. Two issues appear each month, and each issue is subdivided 

 into general topics. Another of the world's leading abstract services is 

 Chemical Abstracts, published semimonthly by the American Chemical 

 Society. Since much of the modern work in biology includes some chem- 

 istry. Chemical Abstracts is as useful as Biological Abstracts. Computer 

 techniques and modern filing and communications procedures make 

 it possible for Biological Abstracts and Chemical Abstracts to describe a 

 paper a surprisingly short time after its original publication. They also 

 cover many of the foreign periodicals which are not available in our 

 libraries. 



Other literature 



A few periodicals do not seem to fit into any special category. Science, 

 published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 



