Trade Periodicals and Newsletters

Trade periodicals have long been an important information source for industry but they are sadly neglected by many academic researchers. A number of established journals serve those industrial sectors most immediately affected by biotechnology: pharmaceuticals, energy technology, chemicals, waste control, etc. Most of these now give some coverage to biotechnological activities but this is generally a modest effort, restricted to those developments relevant to the industry served by each periodical. With the noticable exception of Abstracts in BioCommerce, the coverage of trade journals by abstracting services and databases is not generally good and information may take a long time to appear in some secondary sources (see Chapters 7 and 8). Because of this, and because any abstracts will represent an abridgement of the original source, most readers will probably require subscriptions to some of these ‘techno-commercial’ information sources.