According to a recent study [83] , from 1932 to 2005, there were 1093 journals (537 titles current in 2005) from greater China, including Hong Kong (n = 7, 0.6%) and Taiwan (n = 58, 5.3%) indexed in Chemical Abstracts, among which 51 (4.7%) belonged to biological sciences and 216 were health-related (yiyaoweisheng), i.e. category Q and R according to the Chinese Library Classification [84] . English language journals made up of 9.7% (n = 106) of the total. The majority of the journals indexed were established in or after 1980 (69.2%). The first journal being indexed was Chinese Medical Journal (see Appendix 2) . Up to 14 th October 2005, a total of 693610 articles had been indexed. A full list of the indexed journals with their ISSN, indexed years and number of indexed articles can be found at [85] . [94] .