At a meeting for discussion on The Future of Information Services for U.K. Biologists, the author looks at reasons and justifications for small producers, and possible future trends

Popper, P.

International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)

Secondary Services: The Smaller ProducersPopper, P.IIASA Working PaperWP-74-0131974 Popper, P. (1974) Secondary Services: The Smaller Producers. IIASA Working Paper. WP-74-013 Copyright © 1974 by the author(s). http://pure.iiasa.ac.at/158/ Working Papers on work of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis receive only limited review. Views or opinions expressed herein do not necessarily represent those of the Institute, its National Member Organizations, or other organizations supporting the work. All rights reserved. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage. All copies must bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. For other purposes, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, permission must be sought by contacting repository@iiasa.ac.at SECONDARY SERVICES: THE SMALLER PRODUCERSPeter PopperJune 1974 WP-74-13Working Papers are not intended fordistribution outside of IIASA, andare solely for discussion and infor-mation purposes. The views expressedare those of the author, and do notnecessarily reflect those of IIASA.SECONDARY SERVICES: THE SMALLER PRODUCERSTalk by Peter Popper during aMeeting for DiscussionThe Future of Information Services for U.K.BiologistsTuesday, 26th March 1974THE ROYAL SOCIETYLondon- 1 -When I was asked to give this talk I thought it would be easyto pick out a few of the smaller producers and talk about theirproducts. However looking at the remainder of the program Inoticed that some very large producers have not been mentioned.I therefore started thinking about which small producers I shouldoffend by either talking about them or not mentioning them anddecided that perhaps it would be more interesting to look insteadat the reasons and justifications for small producers, and pos-sible future trends.Secondar,y services in general can be classified into1) Encyclopaedic, covering as much of human knowledge ｡ ｾ possible(examples are Referatnyi Zhuma1 and Bulletin Signalctique)2) Discip1inarean, covering one major subject as fa.r as possible(examples are Biological Abstracts, Chemical Abstracts)3) Subject specific, covering one particular sub-field, ･ Ｎ ｾ ＮDairy Sciences Abstracts4) Mission oriented, covering an interdisciplinarean field insupport of a specific project, e. g. biodeteriorationIt is quite obvious that smaller producers can only fall into thelast two catagories, the exception being a totally new field whichrequires coverage and initially is small and well-defined. A lotof major producers started this way.It i.s perhaps appropriate to examine what smaller producers a.reaiming to do:in many cases they are societal services which try to meet the spe-cific needs of society members, or they are in-house industrialproducts which are marketed to recover some of the costsi- 2 -or they are ｴ ･ ｲ ｴ ｩ ｡ ｾ services repackaging output from secondaryservices. In all cases it is a precarious existence althoughagain in many cases the service provided is essential.It is quite obvious that the normal user of ｳ ･ ｣ ｯ ｮ ､ ｡ ｾ serviceswill not sit down and read or even browse in Chemical Abstractson a regular basis. Yet information is required and the smallproducers are basically trying to meet this need. It is true,that profiles from large data bases would in many cases satisfythe same requirements possibly more speedily as far as currentawareness is concerned and more precisely in retrospective searchsituation than afforded by small secondary services; yet thesecontinue to flourish. Why and how ? It is probably due to thegenerally higher quality of product:selection of material for inclusion tends to be based on morecritical parameters and the abstracts are usually longer andbetter, the penalty of course being reduced coverage and an in-creased time lag. In many cases readers of such services are per-fectly satisfied with this since they say the screening reducestheir reading and the time delay is no hindrance since they arepersonally in touch with all their eminent research colleagues andknow about what is going through some sort of invisible college:the abstract merely serves as a reminder.In industrial environments and here I would include say research-association services, the readership tends perhaps to be less so-phisticated and does not demand large scale coverage:most such services tend to reflect the varying interests of theirsponsors and have almost a capitive audience. If what I have saidso far is not too complementary I must apologize since such ser-vices do fill a real need. In looking at any rational set-up forinformation and abstracting services, this fact should not be for-gotten.- 3 -How small producers obtain their primary information may be amatter of general concern and require ｳ ｰ ･ ･ ､ ｩ ｮ ｾ up and modernizing:what they do in producing usually a ｨｩｾｨ quality product meetinga specific need is basically their own concern and should perhapsbe encouraged and supported taking each case on its merits. I amsure we all feel that the products of the Biomedical InformationProject fill a real need:whether we should continue to produce them by the scissors andpaste method is something that requires detailed investigation.I firmly believe that having spent a large proportion of nationalresources in research leading to ｰ ｲ ｩ ｭ ｡ ｾ ｹ publication we can afforda small fraction of this money to make this informa.tion availablein a form most appropriate to the users' requirement and if userswant small services then these should be rationally produced.If such services cannot meet their mission because of financialrestraints then provided a need for the service has been shown itshould receive help, the terms of this again varying from case tocase. The expensive part of the secondary services these days isinputj if we can achieve a reduction of this item through multipleuse, then how the input is used may '''ell favour the smaller pro-ducer.An interesting case in point is the new Abstract Journal on Alter-natives to Laboratory Animals. There obviously is a real need fora source of information on this topic:the producers carefully examined existing media. and services andfound them lacking. At considerable cost therefore a new servicewas launched:production involves scanning of a large volume of primary literaturefor a very specific topic. The scatter in appearance in primaryjournals is relatively large:- 4 -the costs of identification of articles of interest is hencerelatively high for each item reported. The product is excellentand no one would doubt its merits or justification. I am howeversuggesting that there must be a more economic and efficient wayof acquiring the primary input.I think I have already mentioned that small producers may have theadvantage of quality of abstract over large producers. Here byquality I mean both the quality of the primary article abstractedbecause the mechanism of selection is more strict and the actualquality of the abstract. In many instances this approach recognizesthe fact that not every primary paper pubJished and abstracted by.large producers will be of permanent value. Indeed it is true thatonly a relatively small percentage of papers and publications arereferred to after their publication. Statistics even sug,gest thatlarge services operating SUI services use less than 2/3 of theirinput for these and in retrospective searches the utilized percentagemay be much smaller than that (I have heard figures of as low as8 10 mentioned in this context with the highest mention being about70 10). Does this perhaps mean that large producers are wastingeffort and that we should only concentrate on smaller producers?This would be a very dangerous conclusion since the identificationof the relevant small percentage would require an ability to fore-cast which we do not possess. This however does not Vitiate theargument that the smaller producers do give a higher quality se-lection at the penalty of missing some major new contributions intheir respective fields, particularly where these come from un-known authors or institutes not normally associated with that typeof research.To resolve these conflicting trends and paradoxes would not beappropriate at this meeting. Sufficient that we recognize themand beware of the obvious pitfalls.- 5 -It is perhaps sad that having produced excellent abstracts, manyof the small secondary services do not provide good and detailedsubject indexes to match the quality of the abstracts. In many ca-ses there is not even a notional attempt made to produce suchsearch tools. It is here that the smaller producers must improvethe service they offer if they are to justifY themselves orexpect support.What then should small secondary producers have as their aim:I would suggest that they should present the ｨ ｩ ｾ ｨ ･ ｳ ｴ qu2lity ab-stracts possible consistent with production costs for primary ar-ticles selected for their apparent long life merit and to providefor these the finest possible subject indexing. With such a highquality product the twin needs of large services, promptness andcompleteness, are not of major importance. Such small serviceswill instead become an elite service which may be the first pointof call for researchers in the field covered. Duplication of itemsbetween such small services is unimportant provided of course thata service does not duplicate another one with the same subject aim.A small elite service which becomes the main point of referencein its field will gain a further type of support:notification by workers in the field of major articles '"hich mightotherwise have been missed.In order to clear up any misunderstandings, I am not, advocatinga system consisting of inumerable small servir:es only. TIle majorservices must continue and be improved but there is room for smallelite services meeting specific parameters and requiremen.ts.- 6 -The existence of such services with good search facilities (becauseof the smallness different search strategies and techniques could beapplied e.g. full text searching of the abstracts) could wellalso reduce the pressure for high cost searches on large data banksand result in lower retrieval costs:I have no figures to back this up but it is just an intuitivefeeling.It is indeed the large encyclopaedic or disciplinarean serviceswhich will have to form one of the prime means of notificationto the smaller elite type services we are talking about. Whetherthe feed stock which has to be screened by the small producerori-ginates from an Unisist type scheme or is acquired in some other"logical method, is immaterial. The important point is that thesubset of information forming the subject of the small elite serviceis made available for screening, quickly, comprehensively and cheaply.This would rule out screening of ｰ ｲ ｩ ｭ ｡ ｾ publications by the smallsecondary except in really exceptional cases. This subset informationshould then be subjected to carefUl scrutiny by experts to selectthe best:perhaps we are even talking here of' a vetting process which is asstringent as the referreeing process set up for primary publicationsby societies etc. In this way the elite small service would becomea critical one. It may be that this approach might well be theanswer to the continuously increasing flood of unreviewed and unre-ferreed primary publications. This approach might well allow com-plete freedom of publication, with certainly should not be ｾ ｩ ｶ ･ ｮup lightly but which in the end is self-defeating by its very volumewhilst at the sarne time ensuring a separation of what could beclassed say the upper decile of publication based on vallIe of con-tent in any area. I have already mentioned that there wO'lld undoubted-ly be mistakes and errors of judgement in selection.- 1 -We would however by this means reduce the volume of literaturewhich would be examined as a first step by researchers and students.We would carefully have to balance the expenditure in expert timefor selection for the elite service against the time ｾ ｨ ｡ ｴ wouldundoubtedly be wasted in each retrospective search or even currentawareness reading based on an unscreened total bank. This latterwould of course have to exist, perhaps not with the same deep in-dexing, to act as a safety net. It would always be possible totransfer items from the large data bank to an elite service.If we pursue this idea we might even feel that putting together ofthe small elite serives with elimination of duplicates would providea fairly good selective data bank. This might, if suitably composed,cover fairly extensive fields of knowledge, say the whole or life-sciences. Synthesis might perhaps go even further. Certainly such adata bank would only amount to a fraction of ｾ current large service:since presumably it would be computer based it would be ameanableto in-house use by institute etc. and because of its high qualityindexing be ameanable to interactive and iterative searches by in-dividual researchers (normally the large data banks require muchexpertise in handling and costs of live searches are against indi-vidual on-line usage). We would therefore, as I said before, fa-cilitate and speed retrieval of the "best".What I have said would suggest that I can foresee an important newrole for small producers, provided these concentrate in Riving ahigh quality service in a narrow or specialist area whether this bedisciplinarean or interdisciplinarean. It would certainly be in-teresting to conduct some tests or at least to sOlmd the opinionof users whether these ideas fall in with their needs anri expectationsand whether the costs in selection time are- 8 -I have talked to several eminent scholars who feel that such ascreening process for inclusion in a specialist elite abstractservice is essential and to be preferred to some complex referree-ing mechanism in primary publication and that they consider it asmuch of their duty to perform such screening as teaching. I wasquite frankly surprised to find this feeling which was quite con-trary to the more widely held view that absolute completeness ofcoverage is the prime requisite and justification of a secondary ser-vice: it is true that until a better mechanism can be f01U1d eventhese scholars agreed the need for the safety net of an all em-bracing data bank.I seem to have gone a long way from ､ ｩ ｳ ｣ ｵ ｳ ｳ ｩ ｮ ｾ examples of smallerlife-science secondary service producers and to have plunged intoa highly controversial area. I do not apologi7.e for this but shouldstress that the views are entirely my own and do not in any wayreflect those of OSTlor COBI or indeed lIASA. I do believe that weare faced with a potentially critical situation in the disseminationof knowledge. Technologically, computer science is ｭ ｡ ｫ ｩ ｮ ｾ enormousadvances and 5th generation machines are just around the corner:whether such machines will possess some measure of artificial in-telligence or not remains to be seen but they may offer a means ofperforming the screening function under carefully controlled con-di tions. We should therefore have some experience with screenedelite secondary services so that such machines could be fullyexploited. To go on pushing ･ ｶ ･ ｲ ｹ ｴ ｨ ｩ ｮ ｾ into ever-increasing databanks which become more and more unwieldly and expensive to operatewill certainly not be the best solution, even if we could be certainthat everything is included. To deep index for 100 ｾ retrieva-bility all published documents is a pipedream which can almost cer-tainly never be realized:to attempt to do it on a partial scale without intellectual screening- 9 -of included material to my mind is also foredoomed to failure.Far better to use our resources to make a fairly rough andready tool which will give us an acceptable ､ ･ ｧ ｲ ･ ｾ ﾷ ｯ ｦ ｲ ･ ｴ ｲ Ｎ ｩ ･ ｶ ｾ Ｍ. ｾＮＮ "bility from a general comprehensive data bank and to supplementthis by an elite type service either in the form of small sub-sets i.e. the small producers, and to synthesize these intolarger but still managable services.I hope that the discussion which is to follow will be provoca-tive and lively: the more the better.

Secondary Services: The Smaller Producers

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