History 1926 to present Record depth Index & abstract | Disciplines Science ISSN 0006-3169 | |
Producer Thomson Reuters (United States) | ||
Biological Abstracts is a database produced by Thomson Reuters through its subsidiary BIOSIS. It includes abstracts from peer-reviewed academic journal articles in the fields of biology, biochemistry, biotechnology, botany, pre-clinical and experimental medicine, pharmacology, zoology, agriculture, and veterinary medicine published since 1926.
It can be accessed through number of services, including Ebsco, Ovid and the Web of Knowledge. Biological Abstracts/RRM is similar, except that it covers meetings and conferences, literature reviews, U.S. patents, books, software and other media instead of journal articles. The combination of the two is marketed as BIOSIS Previews .
History
The service began as a print publication in 1926, when it was formed by the union of Abstracts of Bacteriology (1917–25), and Botanical Abstracts (1919–26), both published in Baltimore by Williams and Wilkins. It was published in paperback subject sections, with abstracts usually written by scientist in the US, as a great many of articles in that period were in other languages. At the time of founding it was in competition with the classified indexing service of the Concilium Bibliographicum in Zurich.
The first online version was published on magnetic tape; it contained only the bibliographic information, not the text of the abstracts, and was intended as a rapid alerting service.