Current awareness publications

CA Selects is a series of current awareness publications derived from the Chemical Abstracts data base. For each topic in the series, a special profile assures the retrieval of pertinent abstracts. The CA Selects series topic that is most relevant to chemical labeling needs is Chemical Hazards, Health eind Safety. This current-awareness service covers documents dealing with safety in the chemical industry, as well as the health and safety of personnel working with hazardous substances. Coverage includes effects of human exposure to hazardous substances and hazardous properties of chemical substances and reactions. The annual cost for this service is 75.00. 

These are some current-awareness publications for many safety topics. They include occupational safety and health, products liability, environment, consumer products, food and drugs, workers compensation, nuclear energy, mine safety and health, chemicals, hazardous materials transportation, noise, insurance and loss control, and other topics important in safety and safety engineering. 

NIOSH. 1984. Current awareness file. Registry of Toxic Effects of Chemical Substanees (RTECS). Cincinnati, OH U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, Centers for Disease Control, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. 

These current awareness bulletins are produced by regular computer scanning of the Chemical Abstracts Service publication CA Condensates... 

Current Contents /Clinical Medicine. Philadelphia, PA Thomson ISI. Provides tables of contents and bibliographic information from recently published editions of over 1120 medical journals. Current awareness is the main focus of this resource, so it is an especially good source for finding recent publications. The database is updated weekly and is available in a variety of different formats and platforms. Other relevant subject editions include Current Contents/Agriculture, Biology and Environmental Sciences, and Current Contents/Life Sciences. Available online. 

Regulatory Affairs Professional Society (RAPS). URL http // www.raps.org. The RAPS Web site is a good source of information on educational publications available for purchase, as well as forthcoming training seminars and professional conferences focused on regulatory topics. The Society s monthly journal and adjunct current awareness services are accessible only to members. 

Chemical Industry Notes is a current-awareness service covering activities in the chemical industry and related industrial fields. Published weeklv, this publication monitors approximately 80 leading business and trade journals worldwide. Each issue covers such areas as industrial management, investment, marketing, pricing, and production with brief but informative article extracts, bibliographic citations, and keyword and corporate indexes. 

C l SELECTS is a series of about 210 current-awareness bulletins. Each Cf SELECTS topic is a separate publication. Each topic includes CA abstracts and associated bibliographic information, selected by computer from the CA database according to a precise, special-interest profile. 

C4 SELECTS PLUS is a scries of more than 35 printed current-awareness bulletins—each topic a separate publication. Topics include CA abstracts and associated bibliographic information selected by computer from the CA database. With CA SELECTS PLUS, in addition to coverage of the usual relevant journals, 1 350 key journals are covered in their entirety with references including letters to the editor, meeting notes, and editorials. 

However, retrieval services cater for both current-awareness and retrospective search needs. Whilst computerised document retrieval services are useful for current awareness, there has been much activity to apply computer techniques to actual information retrieval, particularly for retrospective searching. This has taken the form of setting up specialised data banks for numeric and structurail information. These are a form of secondary service but are more closely related to handbooks and encyclopaedias than to abstract publications. (Data handbooks, etc., are sometimes referred to as tertiary sources, but since secondary sources are guides to the primary, the term tertiary sources is more accurately applied to guides to the secondary literature s).)... 

Chemical Reactions Documentation Service designed for both current awareness and retrospective retrieval. Its monthly publication, the Journal of Synthetic Methods, covers the journal and patent literature, and provides 3,000 abstracts of recently published papers annually, together with 3,000 supplementary references. 

Owing to the delay incurred in issuing abstracts and particularly their indexes, a number of publications have been started in recent years which aim at the speediest possible publication of titles only of periodical articles as a current awareness service. 

In other parts of the world, reference journals were also founded In 1927, the first issue of the journal Nippon Kagaku Soran was published in Japanese. This journal has abstracted the Imown chemical literature in Japan since 1877. The Japan Information Center of Science and Technology (JICST), which was founded 1957, took over the reference journal in 1958 for financial reasons and continued publishing it with the new title Domestic Chemistry Series of JICST Current Awareness. The rest of the world did not take very much notice of Japanese publications, now and then an article was cited in Chemisches Zen-tralblatt or Chemical Abstracts although this Japanese reference journal was essential for Japanese chemists. The number of publications, which were cited in Chemical Abstracts increased steadily (34 abstracts in 1907 109,800 in 1991), the systematic access to the Japanese chemical literature was organized after the Second World War Since 1977, the Japan Association for International Chemical Information (JAICI), a department of JICST, has cooperated with Chemical Abstracts Service and since 1980, all CA abstracts of Japanese publications have been written by JAICI. 

The student should not reject a book without consideration simply because it was published one or two decades ago. If it was a good book when it was published, it remains a good book. Of course, the reader of any scientific work must be aware of its publication date so as to place it in the context of current knowledge. One of the advantages of earlier books, especially in quantitative or theoretical subjects, is that their authors tend to give more expansive and detailed treatments than do later writers, and beginners in a field may benefit from the fuller description. 

Discussion of the current state by major publications such as The Economist (8), the Wall Street Journal (9) and the Business Week (10) add to a growing awareness of a need for improvement. An excellent analysis of the current state of manufacturing process innovation in pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry was described in 1996 by Pisano (11). 

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