Alert Information

Alert Information 

a type of information service that provides advance bibliographic information about current and forthcoming documents. The prototypes of alert information were bibliographies of library acquisitions that gave information about books, periodicals, and monograph series. Unlike such bibliographies, alert information, which developed during the 1950’s, supplies primarily information about articles in scientific and technical journals and collections.

Alert information is disseminated in the form of selective lists or systematized bulletins or listings of the contents of journals. The best-known alert-information bulletins, which are produced by computer-aided systems, include those published by the All-Union Institute of Scientific and Technical Information (VINITI) on automation, radio electronics, chemistry, metallurgy, physics, biology, and information science. The institute issues more than 70 journals and bulletins covering approximately 400,000 publications annually. Other alert-information bulletins are Current Contents, published by the Institute for Scientific Information (USA) and issued in five series covering approximately 300,000 publications, and Chemical Titles, published by the American Chemical Society and covering approximately 150,000 publications.

R. S. GILIAREVSKII