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The maturation of a field is often presaged by a decline in innovative papers and confirmed by an increase in textbooks and reviews.During the past two years, the decline in number of good papers has become precipitous; concurrently, the quantity and quality of books, reviews, and bibliographies has greatly increased. In previous Nucleonics reports, we attempted to set up (somewhat arbitrarily) specific criteria for selecting publications to be included in the written text. Our basic guide was that a paper should exhibit something new or unusual in the conceptual sense. Clearly, a large number of excellent articles on applied analytical procedures were thus eliminated, but the policy did serve