Progress Report on the ACM Guide to Computing Literature
i, INTRODUCTION The ACM Guide to Computing Literature (colloquially called Guide YY) is an important reference tool. Published annually, Guide contains thousands of bibliographic citations and numerous indexes covering a given year (Guide 19YY covers the computing literature appearing in year 19YY}. It complements but is significantly different from Computing Reviews (CR). Any item that has been reviewed in CR is automatically included in Guide together with a pointer to the review, but Guide includes listings of about seven times as many items as are reviewed in CR. In summary, to be described in more detail later, Guide provides literature citations while CR provides literature reviews. Today, we are in the position of just publishing Guide 81. The reasons for this delay are discussed in Section 2. In June 1983, the ACM Publications Board asked for a plan to restore Guide to a timely schedule and show the financial implications. We developed this plan during the summer of 1983 and submitted it to the Publications Board at its October 1983 meeting. They accepted the plan, as did the ACM Executive Committee. The Editor-in-Chief of Communications, who felt that Guide is not well-known or understood by the ACM