The Publication Process: Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Sources
From ChemicalInformationSources
Chemical Information Sources Wiki
Contents |
Introduction
Traditionally, scientific research work is first published in journal articles (a part of the primary literature of science). It is then picked up in various secondary tools whose purpose is to better organize the primary literature and make the retrieval of items of interest much easier. Most important of these are the abstracting and indexing (A&I) services such as Chemical Abstracts Service and the Science Citation Index. There are differences among secondary A&I services both with respect to the depth and breadth of coverage of chemistry and with respect to the swiftness with which the average reference to a new primary work makes its way into the A&I databases. A very significant change in scientific publishing is now underway. Innovations such as the American Chemical Society's "As soon as publishable" process for new journal articles make possible the appearance of Web editions of original research articles several weeks before the corresponding print versions. The shift to electronic journals as the archival record of science is nearly complete, so many chemistry libraries have decided to forego subscriptions to printed journals. With so much new information available, there are other sources that help to sift through, condense, and re-package the most important discoveries. For example, some people write reviews of what has been happening in a given scientific area over a period of time. Of course, once the new discoveries have been validated and deemed important enough, they will find their way into various books, encyclopedias, and other tertiary sources.
Types of Primary Literature
PRIMARY LITERATURE refers to the first place a scientist will reveal to the general population in a publicly accessible document the results of scientific investigations. In many cases, the document that describes these results has undergone rigorous review by one or more peers who help insure the integrity of scientific knowledge. Increasingly, however, we are seeing appear on the Web PREPRINTS, unreviewed literature that is posted by the original author. More traditional primary publications include scientific journal articles, published conference proceedings, technical reports, dissertations or theses, and patents. All of these are collectively called DOCUMENTS.
Different types of information and different levels of detail are found in each of the DOCUMENT TYPES of primary literature (journal article, patent, dissertation, etc.). Since that is the case, it is sometimes important to distinguish the document type when a search is being conducted. Therefore, the type of primary document may be coded in a database or printed abstracting or indexing journal that covers more than one type of document in order to aid in retrieval.
Let's look at a few journal titles that one might expect to find in any respectable chemistry library. The American Chemical Society Committee on Professional Training's Library Guidelines for ACS Approved Programs includes a Journal List for Undergraduate Programs. On the list are commercial news journals such as Science and Nature, primary research journals such as Inorganic Chemistry, and primary journals designed to rapidly communicate new research results such as Chemical Communications and Tetrahedron Letters. Also on the list are some secondary sources, such as Chemical Reviews. On the other hand, a new movement in scientific publishing is OPEN ACCESS, whereby the journals are available without cost to the user. The Directory of Open Access Journals contains a few thousand open access journal titles, some of them in chemistry. There are also hybrid open access journals, such as the Royal Society of Chemistry's Chemical Biology which draws relevant articles from all RSC journals and provides free access to those articles highlighted in the tool.
The Secondary Literature
The terms "primary," "secondary," and "tertiary" literature are interpreted differently by different authors. We will call SECONDARY LITERATURE such things as textbooks, treatises, monographs and "multigraphs" (books with multiple authors of the individual chapters), encyclopedias and dictionaries, handbooks and data compilations, review articles and review serials, bibliographies, and indexing and abstracting services.
All of these secondary works have in common the goal of repackaging and better organizing the new information reported by researchers in the primary literature. Since there is additional work involved in creating the secondary works (that is, they gather their information and facts from the primary works), they are always less current than the primary literature.
The Temporal Relationship Between New Primary Literature and the Secondary Literature
Depending on the type of effort expended in their compilation, the secondary works require varying periods of time to repackage or explicate new knowledge. Thus, there is a definite flow of scientific information from the inception of a research idea through the various types of secondary sources. One can typically expect to find the repackaged new knowledge or pointers to/summaries of new primary works in:
- Indexing tools: a few days to several weeks after the new primary work appears.
- Abstracting tools: one to nine months or more after the new primary work appears.
- Review articles: one to three years or more after the new primary work appears.
- Various collected works: repackaged in the form of handbooks, dictionaries, encyclopedias, etc., the most important facts and data appear two to five years or more after new primary works are published.
It is important to understand that the lag time is only partially linked to the frequency of updating of the secondary publication or database. Taking examples from several decades ago, the time lag for two journal articles entered in the Chemical Abstracts Service database, which is updated weekly, can be seen in the following abstracts:
- CA abstract 93:25540j appeared in the volume 93 no. 3 (July 21, 1980) issue of Chemical Abstracts, but the original journal article was in the v. 102 no. 7 (March 26, 1980) issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Time lag: apparently 117 days.
- CA abstract 106:205033s appeared in CA issue v. 106 no. 24 (June 15, 1987), but in the v. 37 no. 1 (April 1987) issue of the Journal of Photochemistry. Time lag: perhaps 60-75 days.
Thus, the fact that an abstracting or indexing journal is updated every week or even daily does not necessarily mean that the primary literature covered in that A&I update is the new primary literature that appeared that week. Quite the contrary, there is almost always some lag time between the appearance of the new primary literature and its coverage in the secondary sources. However, with some abstracting or indexing sources, notably ingenta (formerly, UnCover), the time lag is quite small, on the order of a few days.
A development that is reducing the time lag between the publication of new primary literature and its inclusion in A&I services is the electronic publishing of new journal articles long before the appearance of the print versions. The "As Soon As Publishable" (ASAP) policy of the American Chemical Society and similar early publication policies of other primary publishers (e.g., Springer Verlag) have tended to drastically reduce the lag time. Under ASAP, the articles published in ACS journals appear in the electronic versions of the primary journals some two to six weeks prior to the corresponding print title. The references to the articles are also fed into the Chemical Abstracts database (which is a part of the ACS) much earlier than those for the primary journals of other publishers.
Other categories of secondary works are directories, buyers' guides, biographical works, etc. These cannot be related easily to the primary literature in a temporal sense.
Types of Computer-Readable Sources
There are databases that correspond to the different primary and secondary printed sources. They can be categorized as:
- BIBLIOGRAPHIC - provide a bibliography of documents, perhaps with abstracts, and increasingly with links to the full texts of the primary documents.
- NON-BIBLIOGRAPHIC - numeric, text, dictionary, and directory databases.
Non-bibliographic databases are sometimes called FACTUAL or SOURCE databases, as opposed to bibliographic databases that traditionally give only pointers to primary publications that have facts in them.
The Internet, especially applications based on the World-Wide Web, is accelerating the creation of true full-text databases and blurring the distinction between abstracting/indexing databases and primary journals. Scientific full-text databases on the Web include graphics, for example, the Web versions of the American Chemical Society journals. Both HTML versions and pdf versions of the articles are found in some databases. The HTML versions may have enhanced features such as links in the references of the bibliography of an article to ABSTRACTS (summaries) of the cited articles in an A&I database, with further links to the full-text Web version of the cited older articles. For example, it is now possible to link directly from the various options for searching the Chemical Abstracts database to over 1,000 primary journals through the ChemPort option. A project (CrossRef) is underway to provide direct links from the citations in an article directly to the cited article without having to visit an A&I service as an intermediate step. CrossRef is also the official DOI (Digital Object Identifier) registration agency for scholarly and professional publications. Thus, if we find a DOI identifier, such as 10.1021/ci050354f, you can link to the full text of the article by entering in your browser the DOI preceded by http://dx.doi.org/, as in: http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ci050354f. A revolutionary step in the publishing of electronic journal articles was taken in 2007 by the Royal Society of Chemistry when they introduced their Project Prospect. This provides hyperlinks from words in the article to their definitions in such works as the IUPAC Gold Book and various bioscience ontologies. In addition, compounds are linked to structural depictions and other data about them.
Most primary chemistry journals are now available on the Web. See the list of WWW versions of Chemistry Electronic Journals list accessible through the Indiana University Chemistry Library.
Options for Database Searching
The options for database searching include:
- ONLINE SEARCHING of remote databases outside the geographic boundaries of the organization where the search is performed.
VENDORS of online search services (for example, STN International) lease or acquire databases from the database PRODUCERS (such as Chemical Abstracts Service or Thomson Scientific) and make them available on remote computers. For a given vendor, which may have dozens or hundreds of databases on its computers, the databases are all searched by a common COMMAND LANGUAGE or graphical user interface (GUI). In the vast majority of these cases, there is a fee for searching the databases. Another option is to search free chemistry databases on the Web. Usually, the quality and range of search features of the free Web databases are not as great as those of the commercial databases. In addition, there are many differences in the search interfaces that the user encounters among free Internet databases. Nevertheless, they should not be ignored for certain types of searches.
- IN-HOUSE SEARCHING of databases within the organization.
Large organizations now routinely load databases on their own computers. Several new models of providing databases searching are now being explored with the advent of client/server computer systems and WEB SERVICES.
Tertiary Sources: Guides to the Literature
We will consider works that are designed to teach you how to use primary and secondary works to be TERTIARY works. Many of these are GUIDES of one sort or another. Guides are covered more thoroughly in another chapter.
Link to Internet Sources for the Publication Process
This wiki page was originally created by Gary Wiggins. If you have a legitimate desire to contribute to its contents, please request an account from the sysop, Dr. David J. Wild, by e-mailing him at djwild @ indiana.edu
