The ability of young scientists and engineers to communicate with established professionals at technical conferences is restricted by the financial, organizational, and physical arrangements for most such meetings. Suggestions for improving this situation include quotas for first-time attendees, information-encounter groups, and computerized scheduling and message processing. A basic requirement is simply recognition of and attention to the problem by professional societies and conference organizers.

The advantages of radio as a medium for scientific information flow include its speed relative to printed material, the `live' aspect, simplicity and economy relative to television, and the ubiquity of inexpensive receivers. The licenses of commercial radio stations effectively preclude all-science broadcasting. Public broadcasting stations are hampered by lack of financial support. The physicians radio network in New York City is a for-profit operation that uses a sideband of an FM channel to broadcast special-interest news and information to a limited group. Funded by proprietary advertisers, it serves as an example of `scientific radio', but a drawback is the need for special receivers.

Citation analysis provides a tool for the evaluation of the relative importance of journals as well as papers. A publication, the ISI Journal Citation Reports, is issued primarily to permit users to make such evaluations by answering the basic questions: How often has a journal been cited? What journals have cited it and how frequently? What journals has it cited and how frequently? These data have been conditioned by the inclusion of a `relative impact factor' to give additional weight to the significance of the articles it publishes. The information thus developed is particularly attractive to librarians, journal editors and publishers, individual scientists, and science policy-makers.

THE EXISTENCE and makeup of this group seems to challenge a statement made recently by Derek de Solla Price. As many of you may know, Derek Price is Avalon Professor of the History of Science at Yale, and he has done considerable work in the how and why of scientific communication, especially as regards the literature. After a preliminary analysis of the use of scientific and technical journals, Price concluded that scientists write but don't read, while engineers read but don't write. That's an oversimplification, no doubt, but I suspect there may be more than a mere grain of truth in it. If there is, I'm obviously left with the problem of determining what an IEEE “Group on Professional Communication” is all about. One way of doing that was to try and discover what engineering journals are all about Setting out to do that, I realized that I'd have to first come to some acceptable definition of “engineer.” That's where I got stuck. Perhaps my difficulty with that definition has its roots in some of the same problems which suggested to the IEEE that a two-day conference on the “Psychology of Technical Communications” might be a good and useful thing.