SCIENTIFIC COMMUNICATION OF GEOCHEMICAL DATA AND THE USE OF COMPUTER DATABASES Available to Purchase

Scientific research is producing ever‐increasing amounts of quantitative data worthy of communication to scholars, but more than can be accommodated in refereed publications even though the number of journals is itself increasing. In the last twenty years, the quantity of geochemical analytical data produced world‐wide has increased a hundredfold or more. Geochemical and petrological journals nowadays rarely publish the complete sets of data; instead, only selected representative data are published and the remainder may or may not be put into supplementary publications. In the last five years, a scheme has been set up in the UK which co‐ordinates geochemical publications with a growing computerised geochemical data bank. The data bank comprises not only the geochemical analytical data actually printed on the journal pages but also the remainder of the data set pertaining to the published paper which could not be printed for lack of space. In collaboration with the journal editor, the data are collected into the data bank at the same time as the author is submitting his or her paper for publication. The author enters the data in a standard format and sends them as hard copy or in machine‐readable form to the data bank editor. The editor verifies the data and passes them for archiving to the National Geochemical Data Bank manager of the British Geological Survey whence they can be retrieved. The data are also relayed to the World Data Center for storage and further distribution.