Current Contents gives access to tables of contents and author abstracts from over 7,000 current journals and 6,000 books and proceedings from within the following fields: Life Sciences; Clinical Medicine; Agriculture, Biology and Environmental Sciences; Engineering, Computing and Technology; Physical, Chemical and Earth Sciences; Social and Behavioral Sciences. Tables of contents, without author extracts, are also available in Arts and Humanities.

Current Contents is a well-known product of the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) and popular with many faculty throughout the country who browse it as they do the latest professional journals in their fields to keep up-to-date.

It can be searched from home, from the office or through certain terminals within CUNY libraries and covers a wide variety of document types. These include articles, books, reviews, editorials, performance reviews, digests, letters and conference abstracts. ISI keeps Current Contents timely by publishing database updates within two weeks of receiving a journal and new tables of contents will remain online for approximately six months.

Using Current Contents Search

Current Contents Search is divided into two files. Current Contents Articles (CURA) includes author abstracts for most articles and can be searched by article author, article title, subject and keyword. Current Contents Journals (CURJ) can be searched by journal title, subject and keyword. Help screens are available online.

Document Delivery Service

Once a search has been successfully completed, CUNY+ can be used to determine whether the journal carrying an article is in a CUNY library. If no CUNY library subscribes to the journal in question, individual articles are available (with a few exceptions) through the CUNY document delivery service. The City University has accounts with Chemical Abstracts, ISI, Uncover and UMI for document delivery. Many articles can be faxed at no additional cost to the University. Information on the CUNY document delivery service is available at each campus library. Comments on the use of the service are welcome. They can either be addressed directly to campus librarians or by e-mail to Marsha Ra, Director of Library Services at:

MRABH@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU