College and Research Libraries


the lack of explicit commentary on the 
weeding process. Weeding is implied in 
most of the essays, yet seems still to be only 
an assumed process. Withal, the format 
provides handy idea generators for collec-
tion managers.-]ames E. · Weaver, What-
com County Public Library, Bellingham, 
Washington. 

2nd International Onli~ Information Meet-
ing, London, 5-7 December 1978. Or-
ganized by Online Review, the Interna-
tional Journal of Online and Teletext In-
formation Systems. Oxford, New York: 
Learned Information, 1979. 286p. $35. 
ISBN 0-904933-15-6. (Available from: 
K. G. Saur Publishing Inc., 175 Fifth 
Ave., New York, NY 10010.) 
This volume contains thirty papers pre-

sented at the second international meeting 
on this topic organized by the journal On-
line Review, which is noted for its well-
refereed articles in the field. However, in 
reviewing this volume this reviewer finds 
both good news and bad news for the pro-
spective purchaser. First, the good news. 

The papers are consecutively numbered 
and further keyed by a letter prefix to ap-
parently form ten broad subject groupings, 
although no headings really define these di-
visions in the table of contents. 

Group A leads off with an excellent paper 
by Neal Gregory called "The U.S. 
Con~ress-On-Line Users as Policy Mak-
ers,' which is followed by a paper dealing 
with language uses and ambiguities in re-
trieval systems that is cleverly written but 
unfortunately tells the reader nothing really 
new. 

Group B deals with user education with 
several well-known authors describing their 
experiences in training users in very credit-
able fashion. 

Group C contains one of the more crea-
tive and interesting papers by D. D. Singer 
and others, titled "The Role of a Minicom-
puter in an Information Department to Pro-
vide Online In-House Services." 

Group D offers three papers dealing with 
information costs, international data trans-
mission tariffs, and pricing of on-line ser-
vices by means other than the connect time 
and royalty basis. 

Group E contains one paper on the mar-

Recent Publications I 171 

keting strategies used in Spain for their 
"Red INCA" information retrieval system, 
which interestingly employs remotely con-
nected television monitors to connect users 
with searchers at the various "Re<l INCA" 
search centers. 

The remaining papers address a variety of 
topics, e.g., the U.S. Bureau of Labor 
Statistics Time Series Data System; man-
ufacturing industries' information needs in 
the United Kingdom; the Aslib Online In-
formation Service; the experiences of a large 
industrial conglomerate in Finland with on-
line search services from Europe and the 
United States; the searching of chemical 
structure data files; the searching of che~i­
cal substances; Viewdata and Electronic 
Publishing; the OCLC system; press infor-
mation banks; the NASA information sys-
tem; automated subject switching in distrib-
uted networks; and data transmission speed 
impact on time structure and cost of on-line 
searching. · 

Fifteen of the authors are from the 
United Kingdom, seven from the United 
States, two each from West Germany and 
France, and one each from the Netherlands, 
Spain, Finland, and Luxembourg. All pa-
pers are in English, and they use many 
British spelling forms. Most of the papers 
are well written and organized, with consis-
tent format used throughout, aided by uni-
form typeset titles and author bylines. The 
text of each paper is the typed original so 
that fonts vary between the papers with a 
few done on right-hand-justification text-
processing systems. Thus the good news 
from an information viewpoint is that this 
volume contains a large quantity of better 
than average quality papers of interest 
worldwide. 

But now the bad news. Copy editing of 
this volume is really shoddy, particularly in 
several of the papers, giving a very uneven 
view not only of author's care in final manu-
script preparation but also a poor impres-
sion of the publisher's copy-editing policies 
for publications of this type. On page 258 
even one hand-penned correction is to be 
found. Moreover, authors have occasionally 
coined new, nonexistent words, such as 
"parallely" on page 124. And one of the pa-
pers by a French author carries very in-
teresting French-language words occasion-



172 I College & Research Libraries • March 1980 

ally intervening in the middle of an English 
sentence. Some good copy editing is not too 
much to ask when the price of this volume 
is this steep for a paperback volume sans 
index. Libraries would be advised to bind 
this if more than a few uses are expected. 

This reviewer recommends purchase for 
library or institutional collections, but not 
by inciividuals for personal use since most 
individuals are likely to find only a few pa-
pers to their interest for archival purposes. 
Interlibrary loan will be a justifiable way for 
individuals to examine this volume if their 
libraries would not have multiple-use de-
mand for it.-Audrey N. Grosch, University 
of Minnesota, Minneapolis-St. Paul. 

Garfield, Eugene. Citation Indexing-Its 
Theory and Application in Science, 
Technology, and Humanities. Information 
Science Series. New York: Wiley, 1979. 
274p. $15.95. LC 78-9713. ISBN 0-471-
02559-3. 
A clear, concise, well-organized introduc-

tion to citation indexing and its applications 
has long been needed. This book fills that 
need admirably. Its author is Eugene 
Garfield, the founder and president of the 
institute for Scientific Information (lSI), 
publisher of Current Contents, Science Ci-
tation Index, Social Science Citation Index, 
Arts and Humanities Index, and journal Ci-
tation Reports. The work describes the na-
ture and history of the development of cita-
tion indexing, the design and production of 
a citation index, and applications of citation 
indexing for bibliographic searching as well 
as for use as a research tool for the under-
standing of science, scientists, and scientific 
journals. 

The author's enthusiasm for citation in-
dexing leads him occasionally to overstate 
'his case: "If an index is looked at as an at-
tempt to represent as much detail of the 
real world as possible, a citation index 
would be to a conventional subject index 
what a full-color photograph would be to a 
black-and-white drawing" (page 9). 

But this is not much o( an exaggeration. 
Garfield carefully shows the advantages of 
the citation index over conventional subject 
indexes for indexing and for bibliographic 
searching; these include the lack of need for 
intellectual analysis in citation indexing, the 

objectivity of citation indexing, the increase 
in potential productivity and efficiency in 
searching, the avoidance of semantic prob-
lems and the need for vocabulary standardi-
zation in citation indexes, the lack of 
need-at least at the indexing stage-to 
worry about the variety of human languages 
in which papers are published, the precision 
of the citation index over time, and the abil-
ity of the citation index to identify relevant 
papers across disciplines. To this list could 
be added the fact that citation indexing 
me·asures quality, if only very crudely, 
while traditional subject indexes do not. 
These are mighty advantages, leading this 
reader to become aware of'his underuse of 
citation indexes for his personal literature 
searching needs. 

Garfield thoroughly addresses the limita-
tions of citation indexing as well. Among 
these limitations are the problem of self-
citation, the negative citation, the overciting 
of methodological papers, and the fact that 
citation indexing cannot identify significant 
work that has not been recognized as sig-
nificant by the scientific community nor 
take into account the relative prestige of 
journals. . 

Just as lSI's tools provide an interdiscipli-
nary approach to indexing and retrieval, so 
does this wo'rk present a multifaceted view 
of the applications of citation indexing. 
Garfield demonstrates not only its value as a 
bibliographic search tool but also its applica-
tion to the patent literature and its use as a 
tool for the study and management of sci-
ence, for analyzing the structure of science, 
for measuring the utility of journals and re-
lationships between journals and fields, and 
for measuring the performance of scientists. 
Detailed discussions of methodologies and 
results for these applications are presented 
in separate chapters, each with an extensive 
bibliography. 

This review would not be complete with-
out discussion of the indexes to the volume. 
There is not only a detailed subject index 
but also a cited-author index. References to 
the work of Eugene Garfield were omitted 
from the latter, but a quick check of a sam-
ple of chapter bibliographies reveals that 
approximately 30 percent of all chapter cita-
tions are in · fact self-citations. This is as it 
should be. Eugene Garfield has written far