INTERNATIONAL BIBLIOGRAPHICAL WORK: SOME THOUGHTS ON TWO UNESCO REPORTS Available to Purchase

Subject bibliography is by implication international; the ideal of universality has in fact been the cause of many expensive failures in this field. In the natural sciences where subject concepts are on the whole fairly well defined there is no limitation by country or language. Bulletin signalétique or the Referativnyi zhurnal, although national publications directly subsidized by the government concerned, each in its own way aims at abstracting the whole literature of the world. The extent to which they do not do this completely and promptly is a measure of the problem. In the humanities and the social sciences ‘conceptual scatter’ greatly increases the difficulty of achieving full coverage and thus bibliographies tend to include mainly the publications in a defined cultural region or in countries with a common language.