Information overload: Solution by quality?

Abstract

History shows that when faced with the threat of information overload the scientific community has always found a solution - initially with books and encyclopaedias, then with abstracting journals, and latterly with data banks. Now there are some 300 data banks, which in the past has been the magic number in this growth process when some new solution has had to be devised. So where can the harassed researcher and librarian go? The answer may lie in adding yet another filter to our system of quality control. Traditionally filtration starts with the grant agencies, which scrutinise research protocols, and continues with the journals, many of which submit the resulting articles for peer review by expert assessors and if the papers are published sometimes to criticism in a correspondence column; other factors in this process include whether the message of the articles becomes incorporated into knowledge bases, such as important review articles and textbooks, or is quotes as shown by the Science Citation Index, developed by Garfield - or even whether a library committee decides to purchase the particular journal in which the article is published. If for biomedical journals the last twenty years has seen a preoccupation with questions of originality and ethics possibly the next twenty may be concerned with those of quality.