As the first step to clear up the actual condition and influence of the business activities in Europe and U.S.A., which provide services to cover the boundary areas and charge them standing between information sources and users, the author reviewed general information sources and services in Europe. And be confirmed that the business which provides general and specialized information services upon the request exists there.

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The author first describes the national circumstances as the background of scientific and technological information activities in Canada, and the trend of research and development. And then he focusses on the on-line services among the information activities of Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information(CISTI) belonging to National Research Council.

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Major media of academic information in domestic area are journals of academic societies, commercial journals and medical school journals. The objective of this paper is to study the current situation of refereeing system in order to clarify the role of medical school journals. 92 titles were selected for this study from the statistics of libraries belonging to Japan Medical Library Association Sending the questionnaires to them, useful answers were recovered from 59 titles among the 92 titles. Showing the time lag from the date of papers received to the date of their publication and the rate acceptance of the papers authors compared them with those of representative medical school journals in the world. Also through analysis of refereeing system of Saitama Medical School Journal and its result of the judgement they added the detailed consideration. Finally authors suggest that refereeing system should be located as the dynamic communication link among authors, referees and editors.

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This paper describes Economics Abstracts International (EAI) file which has been included in Lockheed DIALOG System recently. The results of a series of searches and other analysis showed that this file mainly covered the citations concerning Europe and developing countries, and particularly emphasized theoretical economics. The user's fee of EAI file is cheaper than that of PTS file, but the search for EAI file is more difficult than that for PTS file and the data size of the former file is less than that of the latter file. Both files are seldom overlapped each other, and EAI file is inferior to PTS file on the timeliness.

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The test was done for 1) search topics with appropriate descriptors, 2) search topics with considerably broader descriptors, 3) search topics with no appropriate descriptors. As to (1) and (2) the retrieval efficiency was the same both on descriptor system and on keyword system (descriptors + free terms), and the search formulas were easily constructed. As to (3) the descriptor system ensured the recall ratio but decreased the precision ratio. On the other hand the keyword system made the construction of search formulas easy and resulted in good retrieval efficiency. The search system which available both for full match method of descriptors and truncation method of keywords is desirable because each method can be selected according to the searcher's strategy and search topics. Free-term system seems unnecessary.

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A comparative study was done on the results of manual computerized searches using keywords on precious metale such as gold, silver, platinum group and rhenium from JICST Data Base prepared in 1979. About 10,000 citations on precious metals were retrieved from the Data Base which covered about 360,000 citations. Although the relationship between the result of manual search and computerized search seemed constant on this subject, scopes of keywords assignment was found to be different among the series of the Current Bibliography of Science & Technology by showing the figures. In the search by computers it is important to locate the appropriate keywords corresponding to the nature of keyword assignment in each series of the Bibliography.

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