Identifying primary resources

Search notes

Primary resources were listed from personal knowledge, and from the secondary and tertiary resources already identified.

This category includes resources in both traditional and Internet specific formats. There are clearly m any longstanding toxicology journals, which exist in both printed and electronic format. Few a ca d e m ic examples exist of resources such as w e b diaries however, and none could be found which were relevant to toxicology. There are also more usual network formats, such as mailing lists, newsgroups and w e b pages. Some of this material is only available on private networks, and therefore not retrievable by the procedures used in this dissertation. Other types of primary

resource, including letters, notes, m em oranda, diaries and reports m ay also be difficult, if not impossible to trace, due to their personal, private or com m ercial nature. Not all primary material is recorded in print, a n d /o r electronic format, and certainly not all of it is m ade available via network technologies such as the Internet.

To co m p le te the listing, searches in bibliographic databases were carried out to identify articles referring to primary literature, and any relevant level specific tools.

such as directories of periodicals and lists of mailing lisfs and newsgroups were examined.

Search terms included the word stem toxic*, com bined with words or phrases representing the type of resource being sought. The latter included:

primary literature, mailing list, newsgroup, journal, ejournal, report, thesis, dissertation, abstract, course, teaching/training material, syllabus, proceedings, diary, w e b diary, regulation, legislation

(truncation was used where appropriate)

It would be more comprehensive to include more specific terms than the broad stem toxic, but this was avoided, as before, in order fo keep the number of resources fo a m anag eable size.

Some notes on the level specific tools used ore given below:

Journals; (appendix 3.4.i) There are many ways to identify core journals wifhin a discipline. This depends on fhe reason for the core listing, and the definition of the term 'core'. For the toxicology resource listing, the objective was to identify a

selection of prominent and authoritative publications, to illustrate significant examples of the information type. Three ways were used to identify foxicology journal sets:

• Identifying toxicology periodicals from Ulrich’s International Periodicals Directory

• Identifying toxicology journals from secondary service coverage • Identifying key foxicology journals by RANKing

Identifying toxicology periodicals from Ulricti’s International Periodicals Directory

This directory of periodicals was searched fo identify toxicology related journals (August 1999). The directory is sub-divided into subject groupings, but none of these overlap exactly with toxicology. A search for the term ‘toxicology’ retrieves records for 294 periodicals. 114 of these have ‘toxicology’ in the title, and 198 have it in subject descriptors; the 63 records which have neither of these have the term in either a ‘notes’ field, or in the nam e of fhe publisher or sponsor.

236 out of fhe 294 periodicals indexed in some w ay wifh ‘foxicology’ are ‘a c tiv e ’ in Ulrich’s list, as are 87 out of the 114 with ‘toxicology’ in the title.

As a che ck on the subject headings used by Ulrich's, those assigned to the list of 294 periodicals were identified, using the Dialog RANK com m and. The results were as follows:

Rank Number Heading

1 209 ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES

2 198 TOXICOLOGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL SAFETY

3 112 PHARMACY AND PHARMACOLOGY

4 63 MEDICAL SCIENCES

5 41 BIOLOGY

6 27 PUBLIC HEALTH AND SAFETY

7 18 ABSTRACTING, BIBLIOGRAPHIES, STATISTICS

8 17 ABSTRACTING AND INDEXING SERVICES

This shows that most journals fall into the categories of toxicology/environm ental subjecfs, but that a number occur in more peripheral areas such as pharm acy, pharm acology, m edical sciences, biology and public health and safety.

Particularly notable are the periodicals devoted to specialisms within toxicology e.g.:

Advances in Combustion Toxicology Ecotoxicology

Toxicology in Vitro

Reproductive Toxicology Inhalation Toxicology

and those indicating the overlap with other disciplines, e.g.:

• Journal of Toxicologic Pathology

• Annual Review of Pharmacology and Toxicology

• Cell Biology and Toxicology ; an international journal d e vo ted to research a t the cellular level

Sometimes, these two effects may be seen simultaneously, e.g.:

• Focus on Pulmonary Pharmacology and Toxicology • Environmental Toxicology and Pharmacology. • Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology

Identifying toxicology journals from secondary service coverage

The Science Citation Index, and its online im plem entation, SciSearch, p rodu ced by the Institute of Scientific Information, is a multidisciplinary bibliographic database, based on coverage of a set of journals regarded as the ‘most significant' in all fields of science. Selection of these journals, and assignment to subject groups, is carried out on the basis of expert ju dgem ent of ISI editors plus subject specialist advisors, backed up by extensive citation analysis as a measure of ‘im p a c t’ . Presence of a journal in the toxicology section of this d a ta b a s e ’s coverag e is therefore a de fa cto indication of probable significance as a primary source for the subject.

The 1998 ISI journal listing includes over 5,300 periodical titles, assigned to 164 subject categories: a journal may be assigned to more than one subject

category. One of the sections is ‘toxicology’ . Other sections m ight be e xpe cted to contain some toxicology-related material, e.g. ‘allergy’, and ’public,

environmental and occupational health', but their scope is too w ide to be useful for this purpose, and the ‘overlap’ facilities suggest that any journals with strong toxicology leanings will be included in this section. 71 journals are listed in the

‘toxicology’ section, and these were entered into the final toxicology resource listing.

Identifying key toxicology journals by RANKing

A third ap p ro a ch to the identification of key journals in a subject area is to search for a set of items clearly reflective of that subject in a database, and identify the journals from which they com e.

This was tested for toxicology by searching individually on a series of databases on the Dialog host, which might be expected to have reasonable coverag e of toxicology literature. ‘C ore’ toxicology material was selected by specifying that the items must have the term ‘toxicology’ in the title. This also ensured that the analysis was not a ffe cte d by the indexing policies of e ach database. Time periods were chosen so as to analyse roughly equivalent numbers of items from e a ch database. The journals, or other sources, from which these items were taken were then listed by the Dialog RANK com m and, dow n to journals containing 10 or more items, with the results corrected to allow for cases of journal nam e changes (identified from Ulrich). Correction was also necessary to allow for differences in journal name citations within the various files, which are due to variant editorial

The results cann ot be token as exact, due to these problems, but they give an a d e q u a te guide to the situation. Use of International Standard Serial Numbers (ISSN) would have avoided some of these problems, but these are not present in all files, and present their own problems with journal merges etc.

Databases searched were:

Scisearch 1990-current 1603 items

Medline 1985-current 1978 items

CAB Abstracts 1972-current 1180 items

Biosis 1993-current 2453 items

Embase 1985-current 2103 items

Life Science Collection 1982-current 2830 items

CA Search 1990-current 1804 items

Toxline 1990-current 2671 items

Toxline is, of course, a special case, being a com posite file; the search initially generated 3562 items, which were reduced to 2671 by the Dialog duplicate removal procedure. Life Science Collection also comprises sub-files, but it was thought unlikely to have sufficient overlap to make dup licate removal necessary or sensible.

Combining ranked lists from bibliographic databases

In order to find a crude estimate of the most significant set of journals, those occurring in 3 or more of the above lists were ranked, a ccording to the num ber of databases in which they appear, as shown below. This is not an accurate, or strictly quantitative procedure, but it does give an indication of the most ‘visible’ journals, as in dica ted by the ap p e a ra n ce of numerous abstracts in several secondary services.

It is d e b a ta b le w hether Toxline should be included in such a process, since it reproduces subfiles from other sources, and items may thereby be ‘coun ted tw ic e ’ . Given that the purpose of this list is assessment of ‘perceived significance’ or ‘visibility’, rather than bibliometric analysis, it is justified.

8 FOOD AND CHEMICAL TOXICOLOGY /FOOD AND COSMETIC TOX

7 TOXICOLOGY LETTERS

7 VETERINARY AND HUMAN TOXICOLOGY