APA Discontinuing Print Index After 8 Decades, Adding Full-Text Archives

Barbara Quint writes,

After 80 years as the leading abstracting and indexing (A&I) service in the behavioral sciences, this December will see the last issue of Psychological Abstracts. Subscribership for the print publication has dropped steadily from an all-time high of 9,500 to just a few hundred in 2005. The number of records added annually to PsycINFO that don’t appear in Psychological Abstracts has exceeded the total number of records in Psychological Abstracts for more than 15 years. According to Linda Beebe, senior director of PsycINFO for the American Psychological Association the final nail in the coffin was when the print source’s coverage reached only 32 percent of what PsycINFO covers. Institutional subscribers pay more than $1,600 a year for that 32 percent, while individual APA members can subscribe to a package that includes all of PsycINFO, PsycARTICLES, and PsycBOOKS for only $149. At the same time that it announced the “retirement” of the print index, APA also announced the addition of some 70,000 full-text articles dating back to 1894 to the PsycARTICLES file. The annual reload of the PsycINFO file, carried on 13 platforms including APA’s own PsycNET, has also added some new features

Source: Information Today NewsBreaks

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 6th, 2006 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.