The Demand for Automated Bibliographic Systems: A Diffusion Model

The rapid increase in scientific literature has necessitated finding more efficient ways to locate the studies of relevance. For example, the number of biomedical journals increased from five in 1799 to more than twenty-three thousand in 1977 (McCarn, forthcoming). For the biomedical literature, the first large-scale attempt to search bibliographic references using a computer was the MEDLARS system of the National Library of Medicine (see McCarn and Leiter, 1973 for a description). As originally set up, the system was designed for batch processing; the user communicated by mail, and a search request typically took several weeks to process.