If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which Downloaded by UNIVERSITY OF EXETER At 17:01 27 July 2015 (PT)publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation.

In this paper we describe standards and widely adopted best practices that facilitate the deployment of information technology service management (ITSM). We cover the Information Technology Infrastructure Libraryt (ITILt) framework of best practices for delivering information technology (IT) services. As part of ITIL we discuss the central role played by the configuration management database (CMDB). Then we describe the CMDB federation specification, an emerging standard for federating data repositories in support of a CMDB. We discuss two standards for representing management data and constraints on those data: the Service Modeling Language (SML) and the Solution Deployment Descriptor (SDD). Finally, we describe how related but incompatible Web services standards are being unified into a consistent set of standards.

The original aim of this study was to obtain objective data bearing on the much argued question of whether author indexing is “good.” Author indexing of 285 documents reporting biomedical research was scored by comparing the author‐supplied terms (author set) for each paper with a criterion set of terms that was established by asking a group of 12 potential users to describe the same document. Terms in the document title (title set) were scored similarly. The average author set contained almost half of all the terms employed by more than one member of the user group and scored 73% of the maximal possible score, as compared with 44% for the average title set. When judged by the method and criterion employed here, author indexing is substantially better than indexing derived from document titles. The findings suggest that indicia supplied by an author should serve scientists in biomedical disciplines other than his own about as well as they serve his disciplinary colleagues. The general method developed for measuring indexing quality may represent a practical yardstick of wide applicability.

TO INVESTIGATE the metabolism of new scientific information, questionnaires were sent to the authors of 463 papers presented or "read by title" at two important meetings for cardiovascular and endocrine research workers. The preliminary findings indicate that, of the approximately 60% of authors responding, about one-third submitted their papers for publication before, or within 6 months after, the meeting. The interval between submission and publication was around 6 months. Less than 60% of the papers on which the follow-up is complete were published within 2 years. The study is continuing and a sample of the authors will be interviewed before a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the data can be made. However, the major tentative conclusions are: 1. The factors determining whether and how soon an oral report is published after a meeting are related more to the personal characteristics and working conditions of the author than to the quality of work or to selection and publication delay by journals.2. The similarity of findings in this study of biological research reports with available data on similar reports in the physical sciences indicates important common features in the metabolism of all new scientific information. 3. The technique of using oral research reports as tracers to study the flow of scientific information is practical and useful. NFORMATION is one of the vital nutrients of research.

In a follow‐up of earlier studies, Biological Abstracts (BA), Chemical Abstracts (CA), Excerpta Medica (EM), Psychological Abstracts (PA) and Current List of Medical Literature (CL) were searched for 240 published articles that resulted from oral research reports given at bio‐medical meetings in 1957 and 1958. Seventy per cent of the 240 papers appeared in at least one of the four abstracting services, and almost 90% were indexed in CL; however, no single abstracting service covered more than about one‐half of all the papers in any of the three research fields. The average time‐lag between primary and secondary publication for cardiovascular and endocrine papers was about four months in CL, four in CA, six in BA, and eight to ten months in EM. For psychopharmacologic papers, all of the services were slower. This “tracer” technique makes possible and practical a continuous assessment of how a given research field is being served by abstracting and indexing services.