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Dr. Joshua Lederberg
Dept. of Genetics
School of Medicine
Stanford University
Stanford, California

Dear Dr. Lederberg:

I was most happy to receive your letter of June 18th. I hope that you had a
pleasant trip. And 1 was most interested to find out that your first letter
was not stimulated through Godon Allen. Incidentally I haven't heard from
him lately or the Amer. Soc. of Human Genetics.

It is reassuring to find that even you, as a supporter of the Citatioin Index idea
agree that advance work should be done to work out the bugs. This was precisely
what I had in mind when I submitted my orignal NSF proposal. I think this is
evident upon reading the proposal which is now enclosed along with some other
papers and correspondence.

I can't agree that in this instance the reason for the turn down was the financial
condition of NSF. I am certain that manyother proposals in other divisions of

NSF get turned down because there isn't enough money to go around, but in the
Office of Scientific Information they go around pleading that nobody wants to do
research in documentation and always have. What they mean is that nobody wants
to do the kind of research they want. In fact, it is a crime that almost all of the
money they give out is for projects which in a certain sense they originate them-
selves. They just signed a contract with Itek Corp. for $140,000. I'm still not
sure what it is for. I happened to find out by seeing a Stock Market Prospectus
issued by this firm. They also give out money for m« "popular causes” like
translation of Russian stuff--regardless of its scientific value. You can't immgine
how frustrating it has been in the past five years(or maybe you can) to have had

at the helm of scientific documentation activities in NSF a woman who was neither
a scientist or an information specialist, but just a good secretary(a Spanish major)
who worked her way up by taking good notes at meetings and preparing reports for
her bosses. I would never say this publicly, but that is the absolute truth. I tried
for five years to get some kind of support so I wouldn't have to go "commercial"
but it was alosing battle. I even got myself temporarily affiliated with the Univ.

of Pa. ICR and the Franklin Inst. and couldn't make a dent.

Youare probably absolutely right about m going to other agencies. I think I should
have tried the AFRDC long ago, but just wasn't sophisticated enough. Actaally, I
did try NIH(as the enclosed will show) but even then I should have submitted the
proposal through the regular grants office as I think I will in future. I also tried
ONR but they turned me down tom-even though they were sympathetic. I never
approached AEC, but if you knew some of the dolts in their Information set-up
you'd soon agree that might also have been fruitless. I regret to say that a few
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of these people have now gone over to NSF. They still can't understand why
CURRENT CONTENTS is so popular. What people really need is more abstracts.
_ By the time they get the entire literature abstracted--selectively or otherwise
CURRENT CONTENTS will be, I think, making me, at last, a nice income.
I recently suggested a Space Sciecnes edition of CURRENT CONTENTS and
the NSF-NAS A(former AEC boys) still can't see it. Consequently J have given
up for the moment. When we have the capital we will do it on our own and
Iam sure we will make a handsome profit. Itis a tremendous field with most
inadequate information services.

You are right, I think, in your comments about the applicability of Citation Indexes
to biology and medicine rather than chemistry, although J have Citation Indexes
an extremely cheap method of bringing together papers on a specific compouhd.

In our steroid coding project I try to use this principle all the time. However, you
are right that CA does a fairly good, though belated job, and it is a tough battle

to get them to change.

I have always stressed that Citation Indexes are no substitute for subject indexes .
This is true of the legal literature too. First one uses the "digest" to find an
interesting case or two and then uses the citator to locate the cases that have
subsequently emanated from these.

You are so right about the manpower aspect of indexing. CA boasts that it will
catch up in indexing by 1962 at which time they will be back at their old schedule
of only being six months late with the yearly index.

It is a funny coincidence that you should mention the cost of a key punch operator

in Italy. I've been corresponding with a fellow in the FAO in Rome who has been
doing a sort of Citation Index on cards(3X5) in the field of fisheries biology). We
ar: discussing the possibilities that his staff would do the leg work on our project--
or at least on that portion he could justify. The costs walld be about 50% less than
over here. And as you say they can handle the foreign languages easier. By the
way, even clerks with imagination can'thandle Japanese citations!". We'll need
Some clerks with a knowledge of specific foreign alphabets like Japanese, Russian,
etc. Russian doesn't really bother me as you can train a girl to transliterate in
about one hour.

I've taken you up on your offer to read my proposal--it is now enclosed.

Iam sorry but you are trying to give the Patent Offiee people credit for more
intelligence than they have. You don't know how backward they are. Itis Buch a
tradition bound organization that even their approach to machines, which they
are investigating, is completly archaic. I suggest you meet their Dir, of Researkh
some day if you want to be convinced. They did not reject the Citation Index on
the grounds you suggest--it was purely on the grounds that they didn't think it
was worth the effort. You can't find out whether a new patent has subsequently
issues on one which you are interested--you frequently find useful references
to earlier patents in the patent, but these are not references in the usual sense.
See the enclosed paper. The crime of the Patent Office story is even worse as
regards their own internal procedures. Not only should published patents be
Citated, but the files of rejected patent applications are even more important,
because each one contains a wealth of search information that has alrady been
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worked up by an earlier search on the same subject. In other words, if you file
an application on an invention and it is rejected as being covered by the prior
art--and then I come along next year and file on the same thing--they go through
the same damn procedure. There is no simple way for the new examiner to
know that such a search has already been done. Since only 50% of all applications
resiit in patents this means that every other application is on old stuff. In
addition, of the inventions patented most have more than a half of the claims
rejected. And congress wonders why it takes over two years to get patents and
sometimes longer.

The one excpetion to this now is the steroid art in which they are using a very
simple punched card coding scheme. I'm enclosing the code sheet we use. (W.
have a contract to code and screen the literature for new steroid chemicals).
However, the real reason they have bem able to cut down on search time is not
because of the virtues of this code, but because they got away from the old
classifcation system. They would never admit this. Now, instead of going ahead

with simple but. effective methods sach as this one they are playing around with
ali kinds of fancy ideas that may pay off ten years frum now. In the meantime
you can wait a long time. I have an application in since last August and I haven't
even gotten the first action yet. After I do it will still take a long time to get
through with it. You can't imagine how much this stultifies what I've been trying
to dowith my invention. (I've been working on a selective copying gadget).

Returning to your suggettions on a reasonable experiment for a citation index
Froject--I am grateful for these. Your idea of starting with a review journal is
most interesting. Actually it is just the reverse kind of thinking I once applied in
a ppaer in which I suggested that we use review articles are a source of imbex
entries. However, I never thought of using the Reviews as the starting point for
a citation index chain--and now that you mentiohd it I think I can see the logic--I
guess I didn't fully appreciate how much review papers are cited today--I know
that review papers are highly valued by most scientists--but I didn't know they
were citéd in the way you mention. Perhpas this has to do with the defnition of
a review paper. If you have a copy of the Review which you wrote handly I'd like
to look it over. Could you mention a few points in it that you are particularly
intersted in--what subsequent ramifications might you expect or do you already
know have developed?

Of course, in suggesting the kind 6f test that you did you are placing us in the
postion of comparing the Citation Index with the effectiveness of the conventional
indexes. In the enclosed paper I did this for patents.

I don't know exactly what it would codt to conduct the experiment that you have

in mind. It wouldn't be cheap as it would involve a lot of leg work--correspondence
and testing and psychological factors, etc.. However, let me give it some thought
and find out whether I could produce the basic corpus of references needed without
to much trouble. Whoa! You said all the journals we cover in Current Contents.
450 journals X 12 issues per year X15 articles per issueX 6 for the six year since
1952. You can scan journals pretty quick. In llooking for steroid articles we go
through the journals page by page. Whe we don't find anything it goes very fast.
Let's figure lo minutes per issue or half a minute per article. That might involve
250,000 minutes or 4,000 hours--2 man years dr work. However, for the experiment
you have in mind I think the inter-disciplinary approach is not as important since
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you are trying to compare what you find with what you will get out of Biol. Aps. or
the Current List. For this reason I think you could easily cut down the amount to be
scanned by a t lea st a factor of 80%. 800 man hours is not so bad.

Were you thinking of this experiment as a means of convincing people further of the
value d Citation Indexes as compared with emu conventional indexes. In the project

1 proposed to NSF we could easily have obtained the.data you want. Perhaps in rewritng
the proposal we can u incorporate this as a specific experiment to be donealong with
others.

I will take up your suggestion about talking to Dr. Koprowski who is an ardent user
of Current Contents. Incidentally, I am on very good relations with the people at
Biological Abstracts. The Director, Miles Conrad, is a good friend, but I know that
he didn't see the point of spending $30,000 on research on Citation Indexes. He was
one of the referees.

I think that I antitipated you on the idea of getting the NIH Div. of Research Grants
interested. Their former librarian, Scott Adams, tried to get them interested but
nothing came out of it.

None of your suggestions are inane--and certainly not obvious. I would be more
than glad to have an opinion from someone like Dr. Jean Duncan. It would take much
more time to explain how a computer outfit could use citation indexing as part of
a linguistic approach to analysis of documents--but that is really a rought one.(I am
doing some graduate course wark in Linguistics at Penn. and have been giving much
thought to using this principle for mechanical analysis of documents. I believe they

will have to come to it ultimately as the primary shortcoming of all approaches I have
read about it that they treat each document as a separt€ entity--whereas each document
must be treated, even linguistically, in the relationship it holds with related information
in other documents. )However, 1 think punched cards or their equivalent would really
be usfficient for a long time. When our volume of cards realy mounts up then more
sophisticated methods may be in order.

Well, if my last letter left you in a state of shock, this one ought to leave you in a coma.
My only regret now is that it is too late to send in a new application to NIH in time for
the July 1 deadline--I am almost tempted to try it anyhow. But I just finished writing an
application for a grant for Current Contents. NIH asked me to submit one so that we

can reduce the price for individuals. I don't know if I have the pep for anotter one in

the same week.

  
   
   

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ith Cnn to you and with anticipation of your reply, I am,

/ Eugene G ffield