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Evaluation by means of citation patterns can be successful only insofar as published papers and their bibliographies reflect scientific activity and nothing else. Such an innocent description is becoming less and less tenable. The present scientific explosion gave rise to more than a proportional publication explosion, which not only reflects the scientific explosion but has its own dynamics and vicious circles. Publication of results is probably the main means of accomplishing the almost impossible task of accounting for time and money spent on research. Inevitably, this puts a premium on quantity at the expense of quality, and, as with any other type of inflation, the problem worsens: the more papers are written, the less they count for and the greater is the pressure to publish more. What makes matters worse is the fact that the sheer volume of the "literature" makes it increasingly difficult to separate what is worthwhile from the rest. Critical reviews have become somewhat of a rarity, and editorial judgment is usually relegated to referees, who are contemporaries and, perhaps, competitors of the authors—a situation which has its own undesirable implications. It requires little imagination to discover other vicious circles, all arising from distortion of the primary reasons for publishing the results of scientific inquiry.There are, it is true, signs of adjustment to this crisis, partly due to some easing of the pressure to publish at all costs, and partly due to the readers' changing attitudes toward the flood of publications. An increasing amount of research is now being carried out in the form of collective projects in large institutions where publication is no longer the standard method of accounting for individual work. At the same time there is apparent an increasing tendency for scientific journals to polarize into the relatively few leading ones which carry important information and the many subsidiary journals which serve as vehicles for interim local accounting and, in a way, substitute for detailed intradepartmental reports. This division is a result not of some arbitrary decree but of normal competition between journals, as a result of which, however, the strong usually get stronger and the weak get weaker. Were it not for these changes and also for a striking improvement in abstracting, indexing, and alerting services, most research workers would have found long ago that, even in their own specialized fields, new information is accumulating faster than it can be sorted out. These developments can provide only a temporary reprieve, so long as there remains a strong incentive to publish the greatest possible number of papers. A new scale of values based on citations is by no means infallible or, in many cases, even fair, but at least it provides an alternative to the existing one, which is at the root of the crisis.It might, of course, be asked whether wide acceptance of such new standards would not lead to deliberate abuses. A little reflection shows that the system is less open to manipulation than might appear. First, the referees are expected to see to it that the submitted papers cite work which is pertinent to the subject. An increased awareness of the usefulness of citation indexing as a tool for retrieval and evaluation will make this aspect of refereeing more important, and what now passes for minor carelessness or discourtesy could easily come to be regarded as serious malpractice. Second, as noted above, careful selection of references is in the author's own interest, because it helps him to reach his readers. There is, therefore, some room for hope that healthy feedback in the system will tend to keep it viable. At the basis of this hope lies the supposition that, in the long run, only good work can ensure recognition.As Martyn has pointed out, as an information-retrieval method, citation indexing is rather "noisy." The word noisymay apply even more to the problem of evaluation. Whereas in information retrieval much of the unwanted information can be filtered out by suitable search strategy, this is not so easy to do for the purpose of evaluation, because a simple descendence relationship between papers is still an ideal far removed from actuality. The situation would be much better if we could at will exclude all citations which do not indicate real indebtedness. A scheme of citation relationship indicators, first mentioned by Garfield and elaborated by Lipetz, would be a help, but, even if it were technically feasible, to provide such indicators would greatly add to the production costs of the Index.Another possible way to minimize the effects of "noise" is to increase the size of the samples on which the reckoning is based. Now that research has become a rather popular occupation, it seems that a kind of public vote may have to be accepted as a factor in evaluation. Since this is the case, there is something to be said for extending the "franchise" to minimize accidental effects. An index which attempted to process all scientific publications would be several times the size of the present Index, and, what is more, it would not necessarily be an improvement as a tool for information retrieval because most of the significant work is already concentrated in the present Index. Whether this attempt will ever be considered worthwhile remains primarily a matter of policy and economics. In the meantime there is an urgent need for more experience with the existing services.It is not the purpose of this article to advocate evaluation of scientific work by some kind of public opinion poll; its purpose is to recognize a possible trend in this direction. Any judgment by public acclaim is subject to obvious fallacies, but we must not be carried away by the analogy to the Stock Exchange or to electoral practices. The fact that, in this case, the "public" consists of authors whose contributions are generally linked creates quite a new pattern of organization. In this discussion some of the aspects of this pattern have been explored through analogy to idealized genetic or mechanical network models, but the very uniqueness of the system, with its many self-organizing ramifications, makes it a new field which deserves close study, since these developments may have profound effects on the future of scientific communication.

Deterioration of paper in the book stock—especially among books of recent decades—has become a serious problem for libraries, but exact measures of the extent or rate of this deterioration have not been available. By the same token, no good indications have been available of the expected useful life of paper in books currently coming off the press. Furthermore, although attention has been given to means of counteracting one of the recognized causes of deterioration—pollutants absorbed from the atmosphere—similar attention has not been given to the problems of identifying and counteracting the other recognized source of deterioration—agents left in or introduced into the paper at the time of manufacture. Our investigation was undertaken in an attempt to fill some of these gaps in our knowledge.It has been found that modern books—even those written with a serious or scholarly purpose ("nonfiction") and published ("to last!") in hard bindings—are deteriorating rapidly, and many of those issued 25 to 50 years ago are now almost unusable. The paper of an average American publication of the first decade of this century retains only 4 percent of the folding endurance of a typical new book paper of today; even the paper in the average publication of the 1940's has already declined in folding endurance to 36 percent of today's new book paper.Meanwhile this typical new book paper itself shows low initial strength (for example, folding endurance on the order of only 20 percent of that of book papers already 200 to 500 years old) as well as indications that it is subject to rapid deterioration.Acidity appears to be the principal cause of deterioration, both in the older papers and the new. A stabilizing process for neutralizing this acidity was developed and was brought during the investigation to an initial stage of economic feasibility. This process appears to inactivate the most injurious properties found in new book papers and precipitates compounds into the fibers which should, in addition, counteract the effect of pollutants absorbed from the air.A principal technique used for predicting the durability of paper is the accelerated aging procedure developed by the National Bureau of Standards; by extending the use of this technique, interesting decay curves have been obtained which facilitate comparison of modern papers with papers which have already demonstrated their stability for several centuries. These curves offer other values as well for the study of permanence in paper and suggest that a principle exists relating extended accelerated aging to even longer periods of natural aging than those with which it has hitherto been equated.During the past 300 years the papermaker has done an excellent job in meeting the demand for more and cheaper paper. A by-product of this accomplishment has been the production of many weak and unstable papers. This does not give rise to any problem where strength or stability are not critical, but where permanence is important, as in libraries of record, the problem becomes serious. While the present study describes a procedure for stabilizing initially unstable paper, much more remains to be done if relatively stable papers are to be made for books of lasting value. There is evidence that this is possible—that such papers can be made from certain types of chemical wood fibers at but little additional cost. But more research is needed, and the cooperation of the scientist, papermaker, printer, publisher, and librarian will be required to assure permanent books for the future.