Oberlin Group Science Librarians on CA and alternatives (a listserv flurry of March 1999)
my summary of thoughts of the moment re: the above
ACS Accreditation: Library and Chemical Literature and Information Retrieval requirements
20 April
Review of Web of Science (after a trial in Fall 1997)
summary of citation indexing, April 1999
Instructions from Princeton University Biology Library, for Science citation index, Web version
I see in the March/April 1999 STNews that they now have CAOLD ("chemistry-related literature and patents from 1907-1966") available online.
30 June
A desideratum that occurred to me today and seems worth writing out in
some detail:
Getting a sense of the moving frontier of science within a
subdiscipline is easy enough --the
non-primary articles in Science tell tales every week, and if one
is an investigator in a particular subdiscipline, one just knows what's
going on. But systematic means to explore the moving frontier across the
broad spectrum aren't readily available. Citation indexing would serve
nicely, if there was a way to automate the clumping of publications
according to the overlap of their citations --sort of an automated and
generalizing "find more like this one" in which the search algorithm is
heavily weighted by bibliographic content. To make it really useful, one
would want to be able to use this sort of data mining to explore
disciplines, subdisciplines, etc., for example asking the empirical
question: what's going on in Biology now? and then being directed to a
data-based subdivision of biology's subfields and sub-sub-fields. This
is a massive project, the sort of thing ISI is in fact equipped to do,
though the reason to do it is mostly pedagogical, not revenue-producing.