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

39 hand, information synthesis is one element of decision-making information, particularly in the preparatory phase. These two basic lines of information synthesis, however, does not exclude the possibility of other variants. To be found among these further variants are the summaries of a well-defined problem field of a discipline for research purposes or the concise description of a certain topical question for practical purposes such as — for example — information works of the Library of Congress Congressional Research Service for members of the Congress. What is common in information syntheses? The first and foremost common feature is that they supply textual, sometimes factual evaluated information mostly by the processing of several sources. This is practically done by the utilization of any source material that is related to the given topic independently of disciplines, regarding only the value of the source and its relevance as the criteria for selection. These criteria are adequate to the requirement of selectivity and complexity. The comparative approach may also be mentioned as a characteristic feature of the work of selection and processing. The simultaneous presence of these criteria permits to give a high-level survey over the given subject that may substitute for the reading of the original primary literature, or in the case of a large-scale research work it may introduce the user in the subject matter, and it may be the starting point of research. The first phase, then, is the selection of the literature and data, their scientific analysis

, and this is followed by the synthesis. This is why the special literature refers to this kind of information as analytic-synthetic review study. The name of this kind of information is highly varied: the state-of-the-art report, itogi nauki (progress in science), or surveys prepared by information analysis centers are all covering identical concepts. In the above enumeration there is one conspicuous thing. Beside information synthesis and its synonyms, related terms which all denote products of information, there appears an organizational frame-work, the institutionalization of information syntheses. In fact, information analysis centers, which came into being in the sixties, were set up to prepare information syntheses in a regular, professional or let us say "industry-like" manner. As regards their character, these centers are ranking somewhere between research institutes and information institutions, in the same way as information synthesis takes an intermediary place between information and research report. As to which of them in information synthesis is nearer (considering both the organization and the product) to information work or to research, can hardly be defined with universal validity. However, what can be stated is that information synthesis is by all means a type of information standing nearest to research report. Beside acting as a transmission agent between specialized literature and research work, this type of information may become a specific transition between documentation and research activity. To use an analogy taken from industry, its task is not simply to provide research with material, to meet its demand for raw materials, but also to turn out "semi-finished research products". By "semi-finished research products" we mean the processing of documents into tabulation, the rendering of the data methodologically commensurable, the evaluation of their proportions, the analysis of documents (organizational and administrative schemes, science budgetary systems, computation