Uses of State of the Art Reports

With information explosion, it has become difficult for the researches to keep track of all the publications in their field and the current trends in research. The indexing and abstracting services cannot cope up with the specific subject requirement of the specialist readers. The State-of the Art Reports, Reviews, Trends Reports, etc., can solve this problem to a great extent by providing consolidated information on specific subjects. The utility of such publications is two fold: one from the point of view of the historical development of the subject and. the second from the point of view of the individual researcher. From the point of view of the historical function, these publications provide:

1. evaluation of the published literature; 
2. Collection of information from the various sources; 
3. Extraction of the necessary information, and 
4. Identification of the emerging specialists. 

From the user point of view, the following functions are served:

1. notification of the published literature; 
2. Current awareness about the subject and other related fields; and 
3. Back-up for literature searching to be carried out in future.