The Relationship Between Primary and Secondary Literature in the Social Sciences: A Study of Secondary Literature in Criminology.

A Study of the relationship between the primary and secondary journal literature of a social science discipline is described in this working paper. Criminology was chosen as the subject area for study, because it forms a fairly clearly identifiable area of the social sciences, is fairly self-contained, and because it has some distinctive bibliographical services devoted to it which are relatively easy to locate. Criminology is closely related to some other social sciences, for example, psychology and sociology, so that comparative studies of other social science secondary services can be made. The term "secondary literature" encompasses a wide variety of publications, including review literature of many types. In this particular study a more limited, although still broad, definition of secondary literature is adopted; it includes conventional abstracting and indexing services, but also primary journals which contain some secondary material, and various types of recurring bibliography. The method of study and analysis described could be applied to a study of the relationship between the primary and secondary literatures of other subjects; for the present, criminology provides a manageable test bed for the techniques proposed. Three aspects of bibliographical control in the field of criminology are dealt with and data is being collected on five parameters of abstracting services. (Author/NH)