Library and Information Science

Unlike indexes and abstracts, review literature has not been a popular topic for research. And most of these studies have been either on its definition and classification or on its searching tools and lists. Few studies made by Japanese ware mostly in medical and pharmaceutical fields.

Many of the studies describe the Bibliography of Medical Reviews (BMR) as an excellent searching tool for them in the field of medicine.

Woodward examined and counted the review articles published in 1972 in the fields of science and technology by using Science Citation Index, and he suggested a method of determining them by counting reference given in articles. He suggests that 40 references would be practical level of determining that an article should be a review.

To find the coverage of Japanese medical review articles by the BMR, its 1974 and 1975 volumes were examined, and all articles written by authors with Japanese names were searched. Seven hundred and fifty one articles were found, of which 141 were from journals published outside of Japan, including 63 with co-authors of non-Japanese names and 25 with two or more of Japanese names. The latter group's articles could be safely assumed to be by Japanese authors, however, the former group's articles could be written by non-Japanese with Japanese names such as nisei doctors.

Among 610 articles from Japanese medical journals, there were 9 of them from English language journals.

The trouble is that these 610 are not representing a major portion of review articles from Japanese medical journals published in these two years covered by the BMR. The BMR indexed 101 Japanese medical journals in 1974 and 103 in 1975, while there are more than 1,400 Japanese journals in the fields of health sciences.

Igaku Chuo Zasshi, comprehensive abstracting service in the field in Japan does not provide any means of searching reviews.

These 610 articles were classified by their number of references, and the largest group was with 21–30. The result revealed that Woodwards' method can not be successfully applied to those review articles.