György Rózsa: Information: from claims to needs (Joint edition published by the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Kultura Hungarian Foreign Trading Company. Budapest, 1988)

I. The socio-professional aspects of the development of the scientific information with special regard to social sciences

67 are created that work on complex tasks, team work takes shape. The most important fields of research assume a trans-disciplinary character. These phenomena are wholly manifest in the social sciences even though there is some delay in time when compared to the natural and the technical sciences. The tremendous increase in the number of scientists is reflected in the increased number of publications, the final products of research. In the social sciences the final product of research is practically always a publication. Data on the increasing number of publications have been published by several institutions. According to the UNESCO/Auger-report, the number of periodicals has increased as follows: The 1987 edition of ULRICH, the world list of periodicals takes account of 96,000 titles, but the list is not all embracing. The Soviet scientist Dubinin estimated in the 1960s that the number of scientific publications had doubled in every 15 years. Although this process has slowed down since one is reminded of another estimate, by the American professor Kent, whereby a days output of print: books, papers, reports, documents requires a thousand million pages every day. This estimate was modest even in terms of the seventies. However, certain effort is being made by the authors of publications, that is the researchers themselves, to control this "publication boom". There are discussions on what to publish and how to publish. The efforts to enforce the idea of "publish or perish" are also well-known. At the same time there is a tendency to limit the flow of publications. It was Bertrand Russell's idea - as long ago as 1948 - to have periodicals that publish abstracts only and to keep the full manuscripts in regional centres - but this remained an idea. So today — and probably for some time on — we have to accept scientific information as it is, with its ever improving technical possibilities. The interest in publishing - along with some other factors - has made some researchers overestimate the importance of certain publications. In the course of a survey conducted by the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences among 1000 researchers working in the social sciences, the different sources of information had to be classified in their order of importance. The results were as follows: 1) periodicals — 47 % of people involved in the survey 2) books - 30 % - » 3) reports of research, grey literature — 13 % — » — 4) other sources — 9 % — — Early 19th century 100 1850 1900 1960 1,000 10,000 100.000 4. The three main source-orientations of research in the social sciences and the SSID particularities