STANFORD UNIVERSITY
    STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

DEPARTMENT OF GENETICS
   School of Mcdicinc

October 6, 1959

Dear Garfield:

I am sorry to have been so tardy in replying to yours of the 9th; you
are quite right in judging how hectic times have been lately, but not for
quite the reasons you suggested.

The camera-mask arrangement for copying the references looks quite clever-
clearlyi some time should be devoted to perfecting this type of technique/ You
are obviously going to have to rely (ultimately) on some procedure for
mechanical sorting-- it might do well to encode the masks with some system
like ERMA (e.g. as on the enclosed check form) that can be easily handled
mechanically. Of course this will not be cheap except for your ultimate
and romplete design.

I strongly disagree with the addition of d&xxpx&~~ interpretave material,
even the classification of the type of reference.  When you do have a simple
citation index once set up, I agree that this represents xx a valid and interesting
type of research.  However, if this is done I think you should start fram a CI,
and then sample a group of writers, asking them to classify (retrospectively)
their own references.  This cment may reflect my own bias that CT at pre-
sent needs no research to be an extremely useful tool, DiAxhx its
uses including functional analysis of literature citation.

I also disagree that you should attempt any subject classification, e.g.,
genetics, on the grounds that this defeats the main advantageous purposes of
CT, namely a gechanical system of classification. If you start analysing the
references, you might as well start trying to analyse the content of the paper,
and you are back to abstracts.

If you stick to your guns on the original principles of CT, I am sure you
will find it widely used as a research tool, and that further perxfections will
evolve.  What we need more than anything else is to get it goind If it is not
yet practical to publish a complete XXKYEX CT for all of science, then your
proposal 3 is a reasonable 1-g introduction-- (Would it be worthwhile to
copy every citation, then sort the cards to pull out the general science and
save the res$ for later use?)  If you have to sell this program to a particular
study section or discipline, a reasonable extension is to add citations to a
specified series of journals (e.g. EXE&# Genetics and Am J Hum Genetics - this
would probably pull in almost every article in outlying journals that had a clear
and direct reference to genetic problems.) But I hope that, say, the Genetics
panels will be willing to support your more general program first, without demanding
such a concession.  b study section has to back it, and it might as well be
genetical on the basis of scientific ccxnmonsense rather than a narrow concern. I
feel a good general CI will be of greater value of Genetics than a too specialized
run that sticks too closely to the discipline. (Other fields will benefit too,
but that is no demerit.)

I know that yc~ yourself will be keener to do the kind of analysis you're
discussing xh& than just to go ahead with CT as is. But I think there will be
much more support for you if you can demonstrate what CT can do.


The idea of a separate CI for each journal is intriguing: it will certainly
increaqe the possibility of many individual subscriptions, and is as sensible
a way of orgtiising the production as any.  It cleverly provides for the
gradual increase in the coverage of CT, though I am sure this will increase
exponentially.

You can be sure that if you set up CT for citations to Science, Nature etc.
that many authors will then take care to include more references to these Bournals
which will help to ensure better coverage of the literature.

Briefly then, I would strongly urge the adoption of your proposal 3 (perhaps
now confined to CC journals) on a field of 5 or ten source journals, aw
d-x like Science, Nature, PUS.... I would defer extending the
field to specialty journals like Genetics until we can judge the utility of
this first result.However, there is nothing strongly against doing this now.

I am sorry this is such a disorganized letter; your own was rather caplex,
and I may not have understood it all on the first 2 or 3 readings. My 3d and
4th paragraphs may be beating a dead horse, if the suggestions to which they
refer are future intentions, not immediate proposals.  If I take time to patch
tnis letter up, IALt wri, La aikuulul' UUl\jll L)UfdU ydl 8GU -Lb.
        aim
r(y Idall Em, as yuu know, x IS 'IU ancuurage you 'co ge-r, uu with/d the
work as simply and straightforwardly as possible.  If it works out as well as
it must, you should have little concern for enthusiastic support for your
own research using CI.

Yo s incerely,

                                    J lit-
                              a Lederberg

W: I have to check what day CC comes in to the 6bmux dean's office here. I know
there has been great interest, and you should be getting a sizable subscription
order soon. We have a little trouble working out how to do the bookeeping on
billing the individual subscribers, who may have different accounts to pay from.

The reprint you asked for is on the way.

My Stockholm lecture will appear in Scieain due course; I did not give it
until last May, while Beadle and Tatum discharged their obligation during the
festival last December.  The article in Angew. Chemie was the same piece; some-
one there translated it for me.  I will save a reprint for you - did you
want the bibliography now for your own purposes?