Abstract
THE immense volume of original work now published necessitates a very complete system of abstracts, and the requirements of the individual sciences are now well served in this respect. Rarely, however, is an attempt made to abstract separately the scientific publications of any country, so that it is not possible to estimate its direct contributions to knowledge. Prior to the Great War, the now defunct Board of Scientific Advice published annually a resume of the principal Indian scientific memoirs, and now, after the lapse of many years, the National Institute of Sciences in India has undertaken the much more difficult task of compiling an annual bibliography of science in India. This comprises not only the titles of all papers published by authors resident in India and of Indians working abroad, but also of papers dealing with problems specifically related to India. In the majority of cases, not only is the title of the paper given, but it is also followed by a brief, but adequate, abstract. To those who look upon India as a backward country this publication will come as a revelation, not merely from the volume of the work produced but also by the high standard to which much of it attains. In a country so predominantly agricultural it is gratifying to find that so much attention is being paid to biological subjects; nearly one half of the abstracts come under the heads of botany, zoology and physiology, the latter including veterinary and medical subjects. As the general editor points out in his introduction, the present division of subjects, which is under nine main heads, is purely tentative and may require revision in the light of experience.
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Indian Science Abstracts. Nature 138, 916 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/138916a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/138916a0