Abstract
All chemists and many workers in related fields in the Western world are familiar with Chemical Abstracts. This is produced biweekly by the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) of Columbus Ohio USA. Readers in the Eastern bloc, particu larly the countries of the former Soviet Union, may be more familiar with Referatu nu Zhurnal Klumtya ( RZK) produced bimonthly by VINITI in Moscow Russia This is actually just one of a large series of abstracting journals produced by VINITI that cover the whole spectrum of science and technol ogy. We envisaged that the demise of the "iron curtain" would lead to much improved transfer of scientific and techni cal information between East and West and set out to find out how these two major reference works compared to each other.
This paper represents the results of a comparative study of abstracts appearing in RZK and CAS that was carried out in Gainesville over the period July 1988 to June 1990. The basic intentions of the project were twofold. The first was to pro vide data that could enable a quantitative judgement of the coverage of both abstract services by searching for informa tion contained in one but not in the other. The second intended benefit of this study was to provide a comparison of the quality of the two abstracting services. Our work has thus been concerned with the determination of the relative extent of coverage, the relative quality, and the relative timeliness of the two abstracting services. We discuss each of these aspects in turn and also consider how other Western abstracting