Abstract :
Evidence indicates that electronic trade magazines have earned acceptance as a most important source of technical information for electronic engineers. Whether they can continue to fill this role will depend upon how they meet the challenge of a changing technology and other critical problems. There has been a great outpouring of technical articles and papers, but industry is finding that a great deal of it is irretrievable. The fault is in the conventional filing systems, for one, but the nature of the material also plays a significant role. Articles appearing in trade magazines have largely dealt with "problem-solving," but we are now concerned more with questions than with answers. Authors must do more than merely describe how to design the circuit. They must also explain how it will be used, the latest components available, the testing procedures, and possibly, even the availability and price of materials. A second problem is one of semantics. Scientific fields are now beginning to cross each other\´s lines. The field of optics, for instance, is coming more and more into contact with electronics, but their concepts and language are very different. Problem three is the inadequate information on technical presentation. While graphs, drawings, and equations are staples in discussions of technical subjects, there is a wide variation in how these are balanced out. Not enough is known about the relative difficulty in absorbing information presented in these different ways.
