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This article attempts to measure the scientific productivity in terms of number of papers published in journals by authors in the field of information science, compared to the publication pattern for science in general. Information science has been defined by the American Society for Information Science as the science that investigates the properties and behavior of information, the forces governing the flow of information, and the means of processing information, for optimum accessibility and usability. According to this definition, information science emerges as an umbrella-like discipline. If the basic professional society in this discipline is considered to be the American Society for Information Science, then its prime indexing journal may be considered to be "Information Science Abstracts," and its prime review vehicle may be the "Annual Review of Information Science and Technology."

The article presents a list of research papers on subject and linguistic analysis in information science. In the paper "Study of Theories and Models of Information Storage and Retrieval: Report No. 7: Graphs and Algorithms for Term Relations," an algorithm is presented for grouping the terms of a document corpus into genera, and it is shown that the different genera of the graph G = (T, M), where T is the set of index terms and M the reflexive, symmetrical relation of matching, constitute a partition of T. In "All Evaluation of Links and Roles Used in Information Retrieval," links and roles are techniques for modifying a basic coordinate indexing method.

The article presents a list of research papers on application of computers to classification, indexing, and text processing. In the paper "Structure Matching in Information Processing," a new technique for comparing structured data is presented. In particular, an algorithm is developed which makes possible the efficient comparison of any two structures that can be represented by a graph. The study "Common Vocabulary Approaches for Government Scientific and Technical Information Systems," which takes a broader look into the vocabulary problem, was given added impetus by the more recent interest of the Committee on Scientific Information of the Federal Council for Science and Technology.

The goal of the article is to explore the role that the decomposition approach plays in information system evaluations, while considering the evidence brought to light in G. Feltham's paper "The Value of Information." The decomposition approach has several variants in regard to sets of phenomena. One suggests that some phenomena be eliminated, another states they phenomena should be treated as one entity, and the third says that the relationships between phenomena should be simplified.The author focuses his efforts on the elimination variant.

Cold type composition is a method of producing typescript and/or graphic information by means of inputting coded text into core memory and retrieving via programs written to highlight or extract specific elements of text. Such technology represents a significant advancement in information transfer because of 1. the incredible speed with which "printed" matter may be produced, and 2. the variety of publications made possible by massaging date bases already converted to machine readable form. This paper examines the two fundamentally different technologies of "CRT" and "Photon" composition in order to analyze their impact on library and information science. The author concludes we we on the verge of an information revolution which will allow for integration of knowledge to an unprecedented degree provided the information community becomes aware of these implications, and rigorously questions present mans of bibliographic control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a new generalized model for information transfer that has at its heart a machine- readable record. The model points out how the core machine-readable record makes possible interfacing computer typesetting with advanced information technology, the interfacing of primary with secondary publications, and the interfacing of data with document information systems. The model also illustrates how modular information transfer systems can be incrementally enlarged. IMPRINT (IMbricated PRogram for INformation Transfer) is one system based on this modular imbricated (overlapping) model. Some of the modules in IMPRINT, which have been developed by Cognitive Systems Incorporated, are described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout my years of work as an information scientist I have been plagued by a personal and professional sense of doubt with respect to the field. A central theme of every conference that I have attended related to: "What is information science?" Or "Is information science a science?" In this paper I hope to take these questions head on. I must begin by saying that I do take information science seriously as a science. I see it as the quest for understanding of the nature of information and man's interaction with it. That we lack so much in this quest for understanding is the greatest challenge of the science. I intend to explore the tradition, or world view, bearing on the scientific study of information. The currently prevalent world view is the scientific tradition which extends from the Enlightenment to the present. I also intend to look critically at what I perceive to be the premises underlying most of our current efforts to understand the phenomenon of information. The criticism will by necessity be speculative. I intend to stick my neck out, not because I can prove my assertions, but because I believe these ideas must be discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some new text searching retrieval techniques are described which retrieve not documents but sentences from documents and sometimes (on occasions determined by the computer) multi-sentence sequences. Since the goal of the techniques is retrieval of answer providing documents, "answer-passages" are retrieved. An "answer-passage" is a passage which is either answer-providing or "answer-indicative," i.e., it permits inferring that the document containing it is answer-providing. In most cases answer-sentences, i.e., single-sentence answer-passages, are retrieved. This has great advantages for screening retrieval output. Two new automatic procedures for measuring closeness of relation between clue words in a sentence are described. One approximates syntactic closeness by counting the number of intervening "syntactic joints" (roughly speaking, prepositions, conjunctions and punctuation marks) between successive clue words. The other measure uses word proximity in a new way. The two measures perform about equally well. The computer uses "enclosure" and "connector words" for determining when a multi-sentence passage should be retrieved. However, no procedure was found in this study for retrieving multi-paragraph answer passages, which were the only answer-passages occurring in 6% of the papers. In a test of the techniques they failed to retrieve two answer-providing documents (7% of those to be retrieved) because of one multi-paragraph answer-passage and one complete failure of clue word selection. For the other answer-providing documents they retrieved at all recall levels with greater precision than SMART, which has produced the best previously reported recall-precision results. The retrieval questions (mostly from real users) and documents used in this study were from the field of information science. The results of the study are surprisingly good for retrieval in such a "soft science," and it is reasonable to hope that in less "soft" sciences and technologies the techniques described will work even better. On this basis a dissemination and retrieval system of the near future is predicted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is stressed that Lotka's Law was originally only applicable in physical science, specifically chemistry and physics. The more recent general application of Lotka's Law in non-physical science, without appropriate new tests of validity, is bemoaned. A recent test in the humanities is discussed, showing that Lotka's Law does apply reasonably in that specialty. A plea is made for more "spot checks" of so called general "Laws," which were determined using specific subject samples-not only for Lotka's Law, which is used here as an example, but in all such "laws" applied in information science, in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the search aspect of decision making. An experiment was conducted to assess the amount of information utilized by subjects prior to committing themselves to a choice. By construing the information environment in the form of a maze and measuring "transpired" information according to the Shannon-Weaver logarithmic metric, the power of subjects' search heuristics was assessed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A generalized framework for developing analytical and conceptual relationships involving the flow of information has previously been suggested. This paper provides further refinement, rigor, and extension for some of the earlier relationships suggested. In particular, a measure of the amount of information is defined as the difference of the value of the decision state of the decision-maker after and before receipt of the message. This measure is universally applicable for all information that is concerned with the effectiveness of the message upon the recipient. It is accordingly called pragmatic information. The definition is a direct consequence of the interdependence between information and decision-making and of the definition that information is data of value in decision-making. In order to evaluate this measure of information, it is convenient to use a generalized information system model which has previously been proposed and which has virtually universal applicability. The use of this model permits the evaluation of the measure of information in terms of the reduction of uncertainty to o decision maker. Six different types of uncertainty are identified. Specifically, a type of uncertainty which is generally overlooked in the decision-making literature is found to be important. This is called executional uncertainty. It is pointed out that the information science aspects of decision theory must cover comprehensively those decision-makers who not only are expert but those decision-makers who may be mediocre or even rather poor. Although any decision rule may be utilized in terms of the framework outlined, a suggested rule which is convenient and reasonable is proposed for evaluating the decision state of a decision-maker of any point in time. The measure of information suggested is situation, time, and decision-maker dependent. The framework and relationships developed ore on important step toward the development of a true theory of information science. It is further suggested that each data set or document might have some average (over time) amount of information content for o decision-maker of any given ‘effectiveness’. The relationship of this average amount of information as a function of the decision-maker effectiveness is suggested as an important functional relationship that exists for every document. It is called an information profile of that document or data set. A typical information profile is suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On November 11, 1971, the Special Interest Group of the American Society for Information Science on Behavioral and Social Sciences held a panel discussion at the annual meeting in Denver. The audience found the ideas generated of sufficient importance to request that the highlights be published and disseminated to policy makers and other key people. In this paper, Robin Crickman¹ has summarized the statements of the five panelists. The primary message from these and other comments made during the panel discussion was the need to probe more deeply into the utility of knowledge for decision-making, to shift priorities toward making data more usable to policy-makers than to collectors and disseminators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on a series of papers on various aspects of the work of the Fédération Internationale de Documentation (FID). Linguistics is the study of language. Documentation is the process of selection of documents, its result, and the study of both. Since most documents are expressed in language, it is obvious that linguistics has implications for information science. The FID Committee on Linguistics in Documentation (FID/LD) sees as its responsibility to explore whatever interrelations there may be between the two fields and to contribute in any way possible to encouraging more. One contribution is by publication, another by sponsoring meetings. As to publication, since its reorganization in 1967 the Committee has initiated two projects: first, a specialized abstract bulletin, "Linguistics in Documentation/Current Abstracts"; and second, the preparation of a book length report on the present state of knowledge concerning linguistics in information science. The principal topic on the agenda for the Committee meeting at Buenos Aires was discussion of the Report.

The article presents a list of research papers on specific classification and indexing systems used in information technology. In the paper "Practical Aspects Concerning the Development and Use of ASTIA's Thesaurus in Information Retrieval," a detailed description on the nature of ATIA's report literature control problem and the evaluation of a mechanized system for storage and retrieval of document references pertaining to science, technology, and medicine. In the paper "An IGY/IGC Data Publication with a Built-in Retrieval System," a classification and coding system is described which was incorporated into the publication of IGY and IGC meteorological data on microcards.

The article presents information on a conference of the Curriculum Committee of the Special Interest Group on Education in Information Science of the American Society for Information Science. In preparation for this conference a considerable amount of communication took place among its members. The communications aimed at stimulating each member's thinking about the curriculum problem preparatory to active participation in the deliberations of the workshop. The objectives of the conference would be to define the professional pursuits of each area of specialization in information science and to identify the knowledge required for professional practice in each.

This article presents a conceptualization of the design problem for management information systems (MIS). The author states that it is of the utmost importance in the design of new MIS to think about which new organizational procedures are possible with a new information technology. The control system interface and the interface between the decision-making system and the information system are discussed as they relate to the design of MIS. The need for effective design and implementation strategies for new decision-making systems are also considered.

This paper is a survey of a number of issues that are concerned with information science, of importance outside the field as well as within, and generally caused by or related to changes in technology. Issues ore considered in four broad categories, those concerned with computers, communications, image recording and information content. Their importance lies in the fact that how they are resolved will affect the transition of the United States from a primarily industrial to a post industrial society. The intent of the article is to present the issues and their possible impact rather than to offer solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents some remarks on elitism in information and the invisible college phenomenon in science. Science is more hierarchical than ordinary scholarship and it has its inner secret of being so highly ordered and structured in a most systematic fashion. Because of this one has, not only in people, but also in the information they generate, what is called the Matthew Effect. Society is experiencing just now a large reaction against science and its controllers who seem to carry so much of the power of good and of evil. The resultant high technologies dominate modern civilization and determine the destiny of nations more than the old-style wealth of natural resources.

This article focuses on 36th annual meeting of American Society for Information Science, that was held in October 1973. The primary purpose of a professional meeting is to foster the exchange of ideas and to enrich the individual's views through the support or the challenge provided by the views of others. Communication can not be considered apart from the ideas to be communicated. It has been said that the message is the media, and while some may disagree with this statement, all will agree that both message and media need to be interrelated for effective communication to take place.

This article focuses on the factors influencing the choice of accounting policies and disclosure of financial statements in Israel, and how those choices were affected by the interests of the reporting management and the efforts of the entities concerned with protecting the use of information. A field study was conducted by interviews with 19 Israeli bank officers who were presented with hypothetical financial statements of four firms. The study contained two pairs of firms, one showing identical statements initially, with the market price of their stock given as equal.

This article presents a reply by the editor to the authors on information science terminology.

A clustering algorithm which is tree-like in structure, and is based on user queries, is presented. It is compared to Bonner's Method, Rocchio's Method, Dattola's Method and the Single Link Method in three different aspects, namely system effectiveness, system efficiency and the time required for clustering. Experimental results using the Cranfield 424 collection indicate that the proposed method is superior to the other methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the mass public, thus broadly defined, in socio-cultural milieu of singular complexity in incoherence, that the primary beaten zone of the messages put out haphazardly by the mass communication techniques. It is among that public that the mass media will acquire an audience as best they may and get a hearing, drawing in thousands, millions, of individuals of all classes, races, creeds, and ages and of either sex. Among this mass public diversified the information media that will seek their own mass public, whose fundamental characteristic is likewise the isolation of every member in consequence of the disruption of the primary links and of the profound and irremediable heterogeneity of the component groups and individuals. However, the audience thus built up by the mass media acquires distinctive characteristics which differentiate it from heterogeneous groups, which, without the techniques of mass communication, would remain isolated and hermetically sealed off from one another. As a result of the persistent action of the major information media, a progressive crystallization of a sociological monstrosity is necessarily taking place by a fortuitous but effective cohesion and structure of the heterogeneous multitudes. It gives unmistakable evidence of its existence in moments of tension and crisis, like panics, but it is also discernible daily in common- place conversations and exchanges of ideas or views where the messages of the information techniques figure constantly and decisively.

The interconnection of systems into a network permits sharing of effort in certain respects so that, from an input-output viewpoint, only 14 types of systems for handling serial literature are possible; it is believed that systems for handling separate literature are identical, nearly identical, or closely equivalent. Each of the 14 system types produces a different combination of outputs for use by its clientele or by other systems. When the variations in combinations of outputs transmitted between pairs of system types are examined, it is concluded that only 1 3 different modes of such communication-i 1e., lb modes of articulation are possible. Further, the 1 4 types of systems constitute only six overall groups; all system types within a group interact with each other system type in identical ways. finally, the 1 3 modes of articulation can be organized into hierarchies, with the more general modes subsuming the more specific modes-pointing to the possibilities of (1) planned routes for evolutionary development of systems articulative capabilities and (2) the need for only a very few standard procedures of articulation from which the more specific modes may be excerpted. In short, articulation among information systems for handling serial literature is not technically complex on the `system of systems' level (i.e., determining what is to be done) once the requirements of the clientele of the individual component systems have been determined. The matter of determining how to implement the what, however, may well be technically and sociopolitically difficult, and perhaps even economically impracticable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a list of reports on design, testing and evaluation of information systems. Some of the reports included in the list are: "Evaluation of Science Communication Systems," "Recommended Approaches to Design of the U.S. Arniy Engineering Data and Information System," "An Analysis of the Multiple Instantaneous Response File," "Evaluation of the Impact of a Citation Index in Physics," and "A Technique for Utilizing the IBM or the RCA Random-Access Mass-Memory Devices to Store the Data Base of a Command and Control Information Processing System."

The article presents information on the difficulty in accumulating information. All human social relations, all institutions, depend upon communication. Every operation involving more than one person is conducted by message. Messages are literally the articulation of civilization. The stored-information problem of the world as experienced primarily by libraries but also by all other intelligence-storing and providing agencies, is increasingly critical. Already it is affecting human affairs in comparatively obscure but actually fundamental ways. A difference between direct use of the brain and employ of an external memory is the fact that in order to regain use of abstractions stored as records it must cause them to reenter the mind as direct sense impressions.

This article presents information on several publications related to information sciences. The publication "The Revision of the Thesaurus of ASTIA Descriptors," is the printed version of the second edition is compared with the magnetic-tape version that contains approximately 1,000 more descriptors for computer purposes, plus about 175 new terms added in the six months following publication. The other publication "UDC Special Subject Edition for Nuclear Science and Technology," is the first special edition of UDC to be published by the FID Secretariat, which is jointly sponsored by the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority

Presents an abstract of the article "Implications for Documentation and the Organization of Knowledge," by Verner W. Clapp, published in the October 1955 issue of the periodical "Library Quarterly."

This article presents corrections to two articles published in the March-April issue of "Journal of the American Society for Information Science." On page 136, a correction has been displayed in an equation. On page 138, another error has been cited in a sentence.