Needs
At present the number of research journals published in the world is or 130,000 according to Ulrich's International Periodicals' Directory. The number of articles published in these journals may amount to millions of items. Thus, the volume of primary literature, published particularly in periodicals is growing at a fast speed and rate. It is, therefore, impossible for scholars to know about the documents in which they may be interested. Because of problems of scatter and seepage of information, the scholars are unaware of literature in a particular subject appearing in totally alien sources published in several countries. The scholars cannot remain self-satisfied with available literature, if they have to maintain pace with changing dimension of knowledge.
In such a complex situation, scholars require some help to save their time and effort in locating and having access to information from a huge stockpile of information sources. The I & A periodicals are convenient tools to provide scholars a bird's eye view of literature of their specific interest easily and quickly. They cover information from vast volume of primary literature scattered in a numerous sources in fewer pages. The abstracting periodicals help users in further reducing the effort of scanning by giving an idea of the information content of documents and its relevance to the purpose.
The I & A periodicals also fulfil the requirements of scholar who needs to scan information from the earlier literature on the subject for a problem undertaken for study or research.
The I & A periodicals are tools of reference and constantly consulted in libraries and information centres. A representative collection of I & A periodicals in various disciplines are subscribed to by the library to fulfill the demand of users. These periodicals m iced for identifying documents which contain specific information needed to answer numerous enquiries of users and for developing a state-of-art review or compiling a bibliography on a specific topic. Libraries and information centres generate ample of information services and products based on the materials contained in the I & A periodicals.