SCIDOC: a feature card system for retrieval of pharmacology literature

Feature card systems are particularly suited to dealing with information pertaining to drugs, diseases, anatomical terms and biological species, for which elements of vocabulary control and hierarchy are useful for information retrieval. In the biomedical field some feature card systems in the UK have been described in some detail; the McClelland system for anaesthesia literature used a deck of about 500 feature cards of 5,000‐hole capacity, and the Project FAIR index to biomedical engineering literature now has sis decks of 1,280 hole capacity feature cards each containing around 300 cards.