ABSTRACT
The extent to which such developments have already damaged the mechanisms of quality control in science is impossible to estimate. Evidence of an imperfection in this informal system of quality control on journals arises from a report on decisions of the American Geophysical Union concerning publications. The problem of quality became a practical concern for American scientists when the Johnson administration supported the policy of establishing new ‘centres of excellence’ in science away from the areas which had come to monopolize prestige and funds. Comprehensive reviews of literature in a field must provide clues to quality; otherwise the reader is faced with a mass of information which is useless because it is undifferentiated. The problem of quality control in science is thus at the centre of the social problems of the industrialized science of the present period.
