An analysis of data from the first decade of the publication of Online and Online Review revealed that while both cover the literature of online searching, they are very different. Editorial policies, subtitles, and editorial board memberships all indicate differing perspectives. Further, objective data, such as impact factors, immediacy indexes, and rankings within the category of information and library science, are statistically significantly different. Both the national and institutional affiliations of the authors publishing in the two journals also differed. And, an analysis of the titles showed each journal covering different topics within the field.
In 1976 online searching, already a decade old, was beginning the growth which was to characterize it for the next several years. There was, however, no single journal devoted to the topic. Hawkins (1978) in his bibliometric study in 1978 noted:
The unusual aspects of the online retrieval literature are that its core contains more journals (and hence more papers) than would be predicted by Bradford's Law, and a larger number of journals than predicted contain only one paper on the subject. This phenomenon is probably due to the dispersion of the literature on the subject.
Two enterprising publishers recognized the need for such a journal. Jeffery and Jenny Pemberton formed Online, Inc. in Connecticut and in January 1977 published the first issue of Online. At about the same time, Learned Information, Inc. of Oxford, England was also planning a specialized journal and in March 1977 published the first issue of Online Review. In 1986, then, both journals published the tenth volume. This seems an appropriate time, therefore, to analyze the two journals and their place in the library and information science discipline.
A comparison of the first ten years of these two journals should reveal something both about the journals them-