par Eugène Garfield
19891990, in La Revue des revues no 8
The 170 surviving journals that Current Contents would have covered 100 years ago
Every week Current Contents publishes the table of contents of scientific journals, and 170 of these have existed for over one hundred years. The director and founder of the Institute for Scientific Information (lSl) uses this figure to analyze the evolution of scientific journals since the beginning of the 19th century. Garfield points out that their extraordinary growth since that date demonstrates that the chronic financial difficulties they faced in no way curbed their development. Today, even though the impact of new technologies has had some influence on the journals, their traditional structures, according to the author, have not been profoundly modified. The article is accompanied with an introductory note by the ISI.