From the point of view of individual consumer there are too many
scientific papers being produced and published every year, too many to
be looked up in the tremendous and steadi Iy increasing number and
volume of scientific periodicals and proceedings from allover the world.
This is not only the result of the "publish or perish" law, but also -
let us hope mainly - the result of the increasing amount of true
scientific information discovered. Even in a single scientific field too
many papers are to be preselected according to the individual interest
and to be looked through in order to see what they are reporting on.
[And of course they are too many in these preselected to be read and
studied in detai I. At the present nobody wi I I help us with this last
link of what is called the information chain. But let us not speak about
this lamentable point now. l Some tools are already wei I known and have
been used to master more easily the overwhelming flood of scientific
production as far as the first selection of information is concerned.
Bibl iographies covering specific fields are one of these tools. They
extremely faci I itate the preselection and when carefully indexed they
give the user much more than a heap of selected titles. Such a periodiC
bibliography in the field of plant-water relations is sti I I lacking.