Abstracts

MAR 01, 1949

Too little and too late is the reaction of most scientists to the short summaries intended to keep them informed of what is going on in their field now and to tag things nicely for investigators in the years to come. The American Institute of Physics and the American Physical Society are conducting a study of abstracting physics literature. The Director of this project reports on the points of view beginning to emerge in the first four months of the project’s existence.

DOI: 10.1063/1.3066424

Dwight E. Gray

How important to American physicists are abstracts of the periodical literature in their field; how do they use abstracts; what do they think of the abstracts they now have; what kind of abstracts would they like to have? It is questions like these which the study now being conducted by the American Institute of Physics and the American Physical Society, under contract with the Office of Naval Research, hopes to answer. Although the work has not progressed far enough to warrant hard and fast conclusions on physicist opinion, it is likely that most of the major differences in viewpoint have been encountered by now.

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More about the authors

Dwight E. Gray, Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University.