On the basis of an international inquiry concerning databases, producers and royalties, a comparative study of the answers coming from Europe and from North America shows great differences between database characteristics, conditions of use and amounts of royalties. One of these differences concerns the actions of government and for‐profit organisations. The number of these organisations, their activity in subject, type and volume of information, their policies as to conditions of use and amount of royalties, explains the different levels and evolutions of the information industry in these different countries.

This is a description of the first stage of an attempt to improve a thesaurus by providing it with new terms derived by computer analysis of semantic proximity between concepts from a large file of 20,000 documents. At the first stage the semantic proximity between concept and core words was established on the level of a set of higher complexity. This set is defined when making the qualitative and quantitative choice of the concepts capable of being grouped into classes. The second stage will be the classification of terms belonging to that coherent set by clustering.

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A method is described to compile and hold a medical thesaurus through a combination of intellectual effort and the widest possible use of computerization. Various techniques, such as the automatic generation of relationships among terms, are discussed.Certains suggestions are offered as to the kind of assistance a computer can provide.

The great number of disciplines involving oncology and the exponential growth in the number of publications make it increasingly more difficult to keep abreast of the important oncological literature appearing in a large number of periodicals. It is, therefore, essential for the oncologist to be up to date with the journals and to read the papers relevant to his specialty. The cancer literature information system SABIR-C developed by the French and German Cancer Research Centers was created for this purpose. The present paper analyses 54496 papers published in periodicals covered by the SABIR-C system in the period from January 1969 to October 1974. The tables included contain the titles of periodicals which are of particular relevance for cancer research. They permit a quick orientation with regard to the important sources of oncological publications. These tables also assist the librarian working in a cancer research institution in selecting the most important and quantitatively most productive periodicals. This is especially important since he usually has only limited financial resources at his disposal. Further tables give a survey of the countries of origin and the categories to which the latest oncological literature belongs.