The Information Scientist

نویسنده

  • E Garfield
چکیده

NUMERICAL VS. ALPHABETIC ORDER FOR CITED REFERENCES Sir,-in discussing citation practices of journals, O'Donoghue (1) clairrrs that he has never met anyone who preferred the numbered arrangement of papers in scientific journals. May I introduce him to someone who has? It's all quite pragmatic. It is faster to search a sequentially numbered list than it is to scan an alphabetical list of names. Secondly, as I found when the Science Citation Index was fust developed (2) the portion of a paper which is most often scanned fret, after the title, is the bibliography or the footnotes. This may be a purely vaingloriousexercise or it may be the reader's quick and easy method of determining what literature has been drawn upon by the author, Apparently, and often justifiably, one's approach to reading an article is fashioned by the literature that is cited. Whatever the causes of this phenomenon, the quickest method for directing the reader to the paper which cites a particular author or paper is by superscript or parenthesized number. Citation scanning was done long before the Science Citation Index, but now the SC'fis a generally available library tool, it is not irrelevant to mention that numbered bibliographies in papers cars greatly facilitate retrieval of information. Having found a pertinent paper through an SCl search, and having the paper in hand. one often wants to locate quickly the sentence or paragraph in which the starting reference is cited. This can save a great deal of time. After reading the specific sentence or paragraph, the reader may or may not choose to read the entire paper. If the searcher is a Iibrasian, he can circle the key sentence for his client. All of this may seem like so much bibliographical footsy work, but many existing methods of bibliographical citation have evolved. Not at] of them were created by irresponsible journal editors. I could not agree more with Prowse (3) that the omission of article titles from cited references is scandalous. This particular practice of condensirrg citations saves citation indexers a great deal of scanning time. However, the reader is the loser. As 1 pointed out in Science (4) several years ago, the joumat does not really save space by this practice as the author frequently rewords his sentences to convey the information contained in the missing title.

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تاریخ انتشار 1968