DOCUMENTATION NOTE

In a 1973 paper, Sengupta analysed references to biochemical journals in an attempt to ‘provide a guide for librarians with a limited budget’. He not only ranked journals by the absolute number of citations made to 1969 volumes, but related the number of citations to the number of papers and even to the number of words in each journal, as perhaps ‘a better guide to selection of journals for subscription than position in the ranking list’. (A similar procedure is adopted in two more recent articles by Sengupta on physiology and microbiology journals.)