00:00:00 In the beginning, there was the word,

00:00:29 and the word was shared.

00:00:33 For the exchange of information between the early men of science depended for the most part on face-to-face contact.

00:00:41 Since there were relatively few people active in any scientific field, they could get together and talk over their work.

00:00:50 As the scientific community grew in size and activity all around the world, the word was put to paper.

00:01:06 Letters that passed back and forth between scientists became the medium of information exchange.

00:01:12 Of course, writing letters was time-consuming.

00:01:16 To share information with two or three dozen scientists meant having to write two or three dozen letters.

00:01:24 So it was no wonder that scientists hailed the emergence of the printing press,

00:01:29 because now they could write a paper once and have hundreds of people read it.

00:01:36 All that remained was for someone to collect a group of scientific papers, print a cover, and they would create a journal.

00:01:44 And sure enough, in the middle 1600s, the first scientific journals were published.

00:01:50 The Journal de Savant in Paris,

00:01:56 and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in London.

00:02:03 It was a popular idea, and by the middle of the 18th century, there were ten journals being published.

00:02:10 Through regular use of the journals, scientists found they could complete their work more quickly,

00:02:19 keep up with new developments,

00:02:25 locate colleagues with similar interests,

00:02:31 prevent duplication of research,

00:02:34 and monitor the competition.

00:02:37 When there were only a few journals, keeping up with new articles was easy.

00:02:42 Even a literature search that covered several years could be made in short order from individual collections of journals.

00:02:50 But the number of journals continued to grow,

00:02:54 to hundreds, to thousands, to tens of thousands from most of the countries of the world.

00:03:00 Classifying articles for retrieval became slow and imprecise.

00:03:06 To complicate things, researchers needed information from many related disciplines to solve new problems.

00:03:13 Even with abstracts and indexes, making full use of the journal literature wasn't easy anymore.

00:03:21 Keeping up with newly published articles was rapidly becoming impractical.

00:03:26 Mama!

00:03:28 And searching back even a few years through the literature was almost impossible.

00:03:34 Things continued to get worse until 1961, when a new idea was hatched.

00:03:41 The Institute for Scientific Information was born.

00:03:46 The fledgling organization took a good look at the literature and at the way it was really used.

00:03:52 It felt that with the right kind of innovation,

00:03:55 it could deliver the right information into the right hands at the right time,

00:04:01 at minimum expense and inconvenience.

00:04:04 The first step was to develop a practical database

00:04:08 that encompassed a manageable percentage of the world's scientific literature.

00:04:13 Although there are about 50,000 journals being published throughout the world,

00:04:18 the significant articles are found in only a small percentage of them.

00:04:22 In fact, less than 1,000 scientific journals account for over 90% of the important articles in science and technology.

00:04:32 This phenomenon is based on Bradford's Law.

00:04:36 In practical terms, this means that truly comprehensive information services

00:04:42 can be produced rapidly and efficiently from a carefully selected portion of the world's journal literature.

00:04:49 Another important step was to apply to this database an indexing technique

00:04:54 that had never been used for the scientific literature.

00:04:58 Called citation indexing, this technique overcomes many of the limitations of conventional indexing systems.

00:05:06 It is based on the premise that an author's reference to a previous publication

00:05:11 indicates a subject relationship between the two.

00:05:16 These references are commonly called citations and are listed in the bibliography of the work.

00:05:23 Current publications that refer to the same previous publication

00:05:28 usually have subject relationships with each other.

00:05:34 Applying these relationships, citation indexing draws together related items.

00:05:41 Citation indexing is a key to the effectiveness of many of the ISI information services.

00:05:49 From a modest beginning, the Institute for Scientific Information has grown

00:05:54 to include a multinational network of offices, field representatives, and customers

00:05:59 supported from a modern headquarters in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

00:06:03 In less than two decades, the Institute has become one of the leading international centers

00:06:09 for the dissemination and retrieval of scientific and technical information.

00:06:15 A professional staff of over 300 information specialists, indexers, technicians,

00:06:24 subject specialists, computer experts, librarians, and information scientists

00:06:33 produces the world's most comprehensive range of scientific information services.

00:06:40 To meet the expanding requirements of the research community

00:06:43 and the libraries and information centers that serve it,

00:06:46 ISI has built its database to meet the needs of professionals

00:06:50 working in such disciplines as physical, chemical, and life sciences,

00:06:55 environmental, agricultural, and biological sciences,

00:06:59 through clinical medicine, engineering, and technology,

00:07:03 to the social, behavioral, and educational sciences.

00:07:07 The data is extracted from more than 5,000 leading scientific journals

00:07:12 and creatively reorganized into both standardized and customized services

00:07:17 that fit into the established patterns of information use by scientists.

00:07:22 ISI believes that the more access paths it can provide to any individual item in the literature,

00:07:29 the more certainly each researcher will be able to find what he needs.

00:07:34 To achieve this end, several indexing techniques are employed.

00:07:39 Each item is indexed according to author, by permuted title word,

00:07:44 by author's organizational affiliation,

00:07:47 and, of course, by its reference citations.

00:07:54 To serve special requirements in the chemical fields,

00:07:57 further refinements include indexing by structural formula,

00:08:02 by subject terms,

00:08:05 and by Wisswesser line notation,

00:08:08 a method that gives ISI the unique ability to locate organic compounds

00:08:12 containing specified chemical substructures.

00:08:20 Utilizing the most advanced man-machine processing techniques,

00:08:24 a staggering total of almost a million articles a year are screened, coded, and cross-indexed.

00:08:35 Because of the speed and precision with which this database can be manipulated,

00:08:39 ISI services are unparalleled in their ability to meet the total information needs of the scientific community.

00:08:47 An important consideration for every working scientist is current awareness,

00:08:52 gaining immediate access to general information that is being published in the various disciplines

00:08:57 that relate to his own field of interest.

00:09:01 One of ISI's full line of current awareness tools is current contents,

00:09:06 a personal information system that provides quick, easy, and economical access to the journal literature.

00:09:14 Every week, the contents pages of the leading scientific journals are extracted,

00:09:32 enhanced to emphasize important elements,

00:09:46 and reproduced in a number of discipline-oriented editions.

00:09:54 Each easy-to-scan pocket-sized edition enables the user to examine, in minutes,

00:10:00 the titles of all the articles appearing in the current issues of the journals in his field.

00:10:05 Current contents is the winner of the information industry's first Hall of Fame award

00:10:10 as a landmark innovation in information services.

00:10:14 It is now the most widely used scientific information service in the world.

00:10:20 With some editions of current contents, a subject index is included each week.

00:10:25 This enables the user to immediately locate the pages containing titles of direct interest to him.

00:10:42 Even without access to the journals, it's possible to write for reprints of articles of interest.

00:10:49 With every issue, an author address directory provides the author's full mailing address for each article listed.

00:10:58 A more selective ISI current awareness tool is ASCA Topics,

00:11:03 an alerting service which automatically locates articles in the current literature

00:11:08 relevant to specific topics of interest to individual scientists.

00:11:13 Each user simply selects the research topics he wants to keep up with

00:11:18 from a special list of hundreds of topics supplied by the Institute.

00:11:32 Every week, a printout is generated listing the titles, authors,

00:11:37 and journal citations of articles relevant to the selected topics.

00:11:52 The user receives this valuable information while it is new, within days after original publication.

00:11:59 ASCA Topics incorporates citation indexing in its search program,

00:12:03 which means the user is alerted to many articles that could easily be missed by conventional retrieval methods.

00:12:11 For the researcher whose requirements are highly specialized,

00:12:14 ISI provides the unique ASCA, or Automatic Subject Citation Alert.

00:12:20 This service is built upon customized, carefully constructed user profiles

00:12:24 that identify an individual's subject interest.

00:12:29 The result is a personal, computer-generated printout

00:12:33 that is a one-of-a-kind report on relevant articles and publications of specific, immediate interest.

00:12:41 For the current awareness needs of the organic chemist,

00:12:44 ISI has developed current abstracts of chemistry and index chemicals.

00:12:49 This important alerting tool is a weekly abstract service

00:12:53 that reports new organic compounds and syntheses as soon as they are announced in the literature.

00:13:00 CAC and IC is the most convenient abstract service a chemist can use

00:13:05 and is an excellent scanning tool with its easy-to-read graphic abstracts and other visual aids.

00:13:12 Over 150,000 new compounds are indexed in detail each year.

00:13:18 In many types of projects, information retrieval must cover a time span in the literature of several disciplines

00:13:25 to recover all relevant articles on a subject.

00:13:30 For such retrospective searching, ISI has developed a full range of reference tools.

00:13:36 One of the best known is the Science Citation Index.

00:13:40 Published annually since 1961,

00:13:43 the SCI is in reality the print version of the natural and physical sciences portion of the ISI database.

00:13:53 SCI permits searches that are very quick and highly productive.

00:13:58 Taking full advantage of all the indexing techniques applied to the database,

00:14:02 SCI searches avoid the difficulties normally encountered with traditional indexes organized by subject headings.

00:14:09 Now in use in about a thousand libraries,

00:14:12 Science Citation Index is the only reference tool that makes it possible to start with a single key publication on a subject

00:14:20 and use citation relationships to find more recent articles on the same subject.

00:14:26 For a long time, comprehensive searches of the social sciences journal literature were cumbersome and time-consuming.

00:14:34 Anyone who needed information was forced to work with a multitude of discipline-oriented indexes.

00:14:40 ISI eliminated this problem when it introduced the Social Sciences Citation Index,

00:14:46 covering all of the disciplines of the social, behavioral, and related sciences.

00:14:52 SSCI is another portion of the ISI database that takes advantage of citation relationships and ISI's multiple indexing techniques.

00:15:03 Current abstracts of chemistry and index chemicus, mentioned earlier as an important current awareness tool,

00:15:09 also takes on considerable value for retrospective searches.

00:15:13 Through the index chemicus quarterly and annual cumulations,

00:15:17 searches for organic compounds, including chemical intermediates,

00:15:22 can be made by molecular formula, subject terms, organization, and Wisswesser line notation.

00:15:36 Published since 1961, index chemicus provides access to nearly two million compounds

00:15:42 and continues to grow at the rate of over 150,000 new compounds each year.

00:15:49 In addition to these selective examples, ISI provides a continually growing family of related information services.

00:15:57 Very often within the research community and the libraries that serve it, there are special information needs that arise.

00:16:05 The Institute has responded to these needs with a separate department created to handle such projects on an individual contract basis.

00:16:14 These can vary from as small a task as a single hour of specific search

00:16:20 to the preparation of special indexes for a customer's own proprietary data.

00:16:26 Many organizations with large-scale information programs find it more convenient to use the ISI database in machine-readable form

00:16:34 and utilize one or more of the Institute's computer tape services.

00:16:39 Available on a subscription basis, the computer tapes are delivered at frequent, regular intervals.

00:16:45 One group of tapes represents the physical and natural sciences portion of the ISI database.

00:16:52 Another includes the social and behavioral sciences portion.

00:16:57 Index chemicus registry system tapes provide a chemical information service with a machine search capability for organic compounds.

00:17:06 To help assure the most productive use of all tape services for selective dissemination of information,

00:17:12 as well as for retrospective search purposes, the Institute has developed a complete support program.

00:17:19 This support runs the gamut from the availability of search software

00:17:24 through a complete formal personnel training program

00:17:28 to installation and follow-up supervision on a complete turnkey package basis.

00:17:34 ISI tapes have been in active use for years by a growing number of educational, industrial, and government research organizations

00:17:42 to provide their own internal information dissemination services.

00:17:47 Several national information centers have taken full advantage of ISI tapes.

00:17:52 The entire range of ISI services is an important part of the National Information System of Spain,

00:17:59 distributed through the Ministry of Education.

00:18:02 The ASCA alerting service and the Index chemicus registry system are part of a nationwide information system in Japan.

00:18:10 ISI tape systems are in use at the National Research Council in Canada,

00:18:18 the Royal Technical Institute in Sweden,

00:18:24 the German Institute for Medical Documentation and Information,

00:18:30 the National Center of Scientific and Technological Information in Israel,

00:18:36 and the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research.

00:18:43 Vital support for all users of any of the ISI information systems is OATS,

00:18:49 the Institute's original article tear-sheet service.

00:18:53 This international library service provides prompt, convenient, and economical access

00:18:58 to hard copies of articles located by any of the ISI information systems

00:19:03 when they are not readily available through regular library channels or when an article is needed extra fast.

00:19:10 Within 24 hours or less, OATS article requests are filled directly from the source journals

00:19:16 in the Institute's own extensive collection.

00:19:22 ISI's user-oriented services meet every information need,

00:19:27 from providing a single article to turnkey delivery of a complete, custom-designed information system.

00:19:36 Information about any of these services is available from one of ISI's field representatives.

00:19:42 Operating from key cities around the world, these men are trained information specialists

00:19:48 with years of experience in assisting librarians, information center managers,

00:19:54 and individual researchers to solve their information problems.

00:20:00 Responsive to individual requirements, they apply their expertise in many ways.

00:20:05 One of them is to help subscribers to select the right combination of Institute-developed services

00:20:11 to meet their needs.

00:20:14 Another is to educate the men and women who will use the selected services,

00:20:18 to apply them with maximum effectiveness in supporting their research requirements.

00:20:24 And, of course, to follow up the use of ISI services in each installation,

00:20:30 not only to help assure that the service is being used effectively,

00:20:34 but to make sure that the selected service is accomplishing the job required of it.

00:20:40 For service is an Institute goal.

00:20:43 Information service that can solve the growing literature handling problems of the scientist and librarian.

00:20:50 Expanded awareness, improved professional performance,

00:20:55 and achievement of research goals are attainable through more effective use of published scientific information.

00:21:03 And here, ISI leads the way to putting scientific information to work.

00:21:10 Music