The International e-Journal of Abstracts for Cybernetics and Systems Research of the IFSR is a collection of bibliography from the field of knowledge in cybernetics, systemics, systems sciences, systems research both scientific, applied and out of practical experience. It is the first attempt to collect a bibliography of cybernetics and systems research world wide. It aims at consolidating scientific and applied knowledge of an emerging and developing new science domain with increasing implementation wherever systems occur and are designed.
The role of a Journal of Abstracts is well known in many sciences. Especially in natural sciences and medicine they serve a good job to both scientists and practitioners. It has assisted them to collaborate, communicate, exchange knowledge, find joint interests and applications, acknowledge ideas and solve problems since centuries. Systems research is developing and fusing in many domains of life and science, the number of publications grows, research fields differentiate into a growing number, knowledge compounds diverge from one another to meet and adhere to new ones.
The founders of cybernetics and systems research created remarkable written heritage during the first stage of development, during a second stage a great number of researchers and practitioners from the next generation contributed many publications of high quality and remarkable applicability. The next generations submit new knowledge, but have difficulties to survey the large number of novelties in a significant number of languages, moreover it has become difficult to keep up-to-date except in a narrow own field of research. This situation, as in other sciences in previous periods of time, makes it necessary to publish a referring journal of abstracts. In the 19th and 20th century journals of abstracts were published in the traditional way and used mainly in libraries, because the libraries were the only medium of knowledge communication. Now we have the World Wide Web - and why not use it as a faster and more flexible medium.
Traditional journals of abstracts were prepared by a huge team, who wrote the abstracts, for authors were not experienced in writing abstracts on their own creations. During the second half of the 20th century most of the respectful publications requested an abstract and keywords to each title and the recent two generations of scholars have no difficulties with this any more. Most of the scientific communities have an authorized legitimate register / index / list of keywords, which and only which can be used for describing the content of a scientific contribution. IFSR has already one too. However, many of the authors use their own choices of words and phrases. Probably, the freedom of the World Wide Web taught authors a freedom of choice for terminology. The International e-Journal of Abstracts will publish the contents of information items as the author chose to present it.
Proceedings, but also books and other respectful editions are already published on electronic carriers, the .pdf format next to Word-format are the preferred. The team of the e-Journal chose to include affiliation and addresses, in the form the authors introduce themselves. In plain words, it is mainly a "copy-and-paste job".
It is the Team's ambition to make it possible for all users to see and read Bibliographic Units (BU) in any alphabet in any language, i.e. to make authors from different countries, representatives and promoter of different cultures equally accessible and understandable. The Demo Version shows BUs in Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Russian, Greek, Bulgarian, etc., some insufficiencies due to initial difficulties may occur.
