Beginning in 1957, the literature explosion in science eliminated many personal subscriptions to journals and scientists with interdisciplinary interests demanded new approaches to current awareness. One of these, Current Contents now forms a major link in scientific communications. New ‘Selective Dissemination of Information’ services have helped to mechanize the process of scanning titles for keywords, and new tools for retrospective searching have facilitated historical studies of the scientific literature. The journal literature continues to evolve by means of a process analogous to natural selection.
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