It includes abstracts from peer-reviewed academic journal articles in the fields of biology, biochemistry, biotechnology, botany, pre-clinical and experimental medicine, pharmacology, zoology, agriculture, and veterinary medicine, and has been published since 1926.
[1][2] It can be accessed through a number of services, including EBSCO, Ovid[3] and Web of Science.
[4] It was published in paperback subject sections, with abstracts usually written by scientists in the US, as a great many articles from that period were in other languages.
At the time of founding, it was in competition with the classified indexing service of the Concilium Bibliographicum in Zurich.
[5][6][7][8] The first online version was published on magnetic tape; it contained only the bibliographic information, not the text of the abstracts, and was intended as a rapid alerting service.