The Declining Value of Subscription-based Abstracting and Indexing Services in the New Knowledge Dissemination Era

The author uses systematic random sampling to test the hypothesis that all scholarly journals have tables of contents and possibly abstracts and keywords posted on the Internet. This free bibliographic data allows users to browse and search articles and form the base for free interactive services, such as email alerts, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and API (application programming interface). Free abstracting and indexing services (A&I) around the world are growing both in numbers and in depth and breadth of coverage. With so many free alternatives for article search and retrieval, librarians may want to shift some of their budgets from commercial A&I services to other resources that do not have strong, free alternatives.