The Publication Speed of Information in Bibliographic Chemical Databases

The quality of bibliographic databases depends very much on the reliably fast follow-up of the pertinent literature. We have studied this quality feature of two important chemical bibliographic databases: Chemical Abstracts (CA) and Analytical Abstracts (AA). The follow-up rate (speed of information) of these databases has been determined with respect to 10 core journals in analytical chemistry. On the average the performance of Chemical Abstracts has been good over the past decade, while the formerly poor performance of Analytical Abstracts has improved considerably. Some quite unexpected nonuniformities can, however, still be detected in the publication time distributions of both databases.