Contemporary Topics in Immunobiology

Investigators, teachers, and practitioners in the biomedical sciences are keenly aware of the current crisis in scientific communications. With well over a thousand biomedical journals producing new issues each month, and with approximately five hundred new technical books in biomedicine being 1 published each year, not to mention the proliferation of information-ex change meetings, it is all too clear that we are in danger of being inundated by a flood of tables, figures, and hypotheses. The problem is particularly acute in immunology, as the rate of information production is increasing geometrically, and immunological approaches have been extended into other biological and medical fields to further diversify the research over a vast literature. Abstracting and information-retrieval services do much to improve the investigator's lot, but do not offer solutions for one particularly distressing aspect of the crisis. In the midst of our informational overabundance, one often finds that interrelationships between an investigator's collective findings are becoming blurred, or that the relation of his total work to the field are not clear. Although review articles are indispensable in fixing the status of a given problem, they do not provide the detailed attention to a single author's work that is needed.