Abstracts Available to Purchase

How important to American physicists are abstracts of the periodical literature in their field; how do they use abstracts; what do they think of the abstracts they now have; what kind of abstracts would they like to have? It is questions like these which the study now being conducted by the American Institute of Physics and the American Physical Society, under contract with the Office of Naval Research, hopes to answer. Although the work has not progressed far enough to warrant hard and fast conclusions on physicist opinion, it is likely that most of the major differences in viewpoint have been encountered by now.