Bibliographic data base usage in a large technical community

A survey of the bibliographic data bases used in satisfying some of the information requests received by the Bell Laboratories literature searching service was made. Fifty‐eight information sources were used 305 times; four major sources accounted for 155 (51%) of the uses. Approximately half of the literature searches performed used only one data base; about 70% used either one or two. Machine searching is growing and is becoming more effective.