Evaluation of abstract journals and other sources consulted for 75 literature searches on food science and food technology

For seventy‐five literature searches on food science recorded, in forty or more sources consulted (primarily abstract journals and documentation centres) the references were found. The searches were done between 1969 and 1975 and comprised 10,764 references. A breakdown was made for six arbitrarily chosen areas of food science: agriculture, microbiology, chemistry, engineering, processing and products. With the aid of discrimination analysis we determined which of the sources need to be consulted in each area if a reasonable degree of exhaustiveness of coverage is to be achieved (∼ 95 per cent of that achieved in our searches). Precious studies indicate the inadequacy of individual sources in food science. Our quantitative study confirms these findings. Of the 10,764 references, as many as 8,737 (81 per cent) were unique to one source. Non‐unique references were seldom cited in more than two or three sources. In all, thirty of the forty‐odd sources are ‘indispensable’ for at least one of the six areas. Although the results are influenced to some extent by the field of interest of our laboratory, it was concluded that reliance on just one or two key sources in the food area is unjustified, irrespective of the search topic. The results may help in the development of future search strategies and in the choice of abstract journals for special libraries.