The changing role of Psychological Abstracts in scientific communication.

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Abstract
The revised operation of PA [Psychological Abstracts] utilizes its strategic position in the dissemination network of psychology to survey the literature fully. The proposed operation of PA offers an approach that represents a radical departure from traditional information retrieval. The 100-200 journals making the largest contribution to psychology and containing the major portion of the relevant literature (80%) very likely pose no major retrieval problem for the active researcher. A large proportion of these journals are readily available in the libraries of major universities, and their contents are generally abstracted and indexed by several services. They are likely to be published in English (or have English abstracts) and to be typical of, or heavily influenced by, American psychology. Over the past 2 years PA has developed appropriate operations to carry out such dissemination (current time lag between publication of an article in a prime journal and the appearance of its abstract in PA is now about 4 months). The remaining 15-20% of the literature comes from about 800 journals. Many are inaccessible and most are in languages other than English. Generally, the articles appearing in such journals are not much influenced by work in American psychology and many are in journals identified with other disciplines (e.g., zoology). The plan provides for monitoring this literature for consistent research efforts on psychological problems. When such a line of research is discovered, a summary abstract would be prepared describing the objectives of the research and placing it in some context of related work. In covering the peripheral literature, the concentration on investigators who are consistently following a single line of research seems to be a new and potentially profitable approach. In psychology, and possibly in many other behavioral sciences, critical experiments seem to be rarely performed, and generally, a sizable contribution is required to have much apparent effect on the field. The plan proposed for PA develops methods for locating such "clusters of research"in the peripheral literature and presenting them, in context, to American psychologists.

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