College & Research Libraries News
Letters
Physics journals
To the Editor:
I would like to point out an apparent error in Katharine Clark and William Kinyon’s article, “The Interdisciplinary Use of Physics Journals,” February 1989, pp. 145-50. In Table 3 (coverage of 36 physics journals by 8 major indexes), Chemical Abstracts is shown as not covering a number of titles. Searching the CAS Online file’s source field (/so) with journal abbreviations and limiting retrieval to publications dated 1983-1985 gives the following: Classical & Quantum Gravity (57 articles), Nuevo Cimento (1,493 articles), Zeitschrift für Physik—B (407 articles).
Please also note that strictly speaking CAS does not cover English translations of foreign-language journals. This, because as a matter of policy they abstract the foreign-language publication. Your readers will be interested in the following figures (for 1983-1985): Pisma Zh Eksp Teor Fiz (]ETP Letters) 933 articles, Tad Fiz (Soviet J Nucl Phys) (1,402 letters), Fiz Elem Chastits Yad (Sov J Part Nucl) (82 articles), and Zh Eksp Teor Fiz (Sov Phys—JETP) (949 articles).
Those results argue very strongly for searching CAS Online for “physics” questions. At Caltech, CAS Online is searched routinely for virtually all science and engineering questions (except for pure mathematics), in conjunction with searches in other databases (such as Inspec, Biosis, Medline, or the SCI).—Dana L. Roth, Head, Science & Engineering Libraries, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. ■ ■
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