Abstract

In times when the Internet was not part of every household, when there were no smartphones and mobile applications and when not everyone was connected via social networks, searching literature and obtaining relevant articles published in international journals was a challenging and time-consuming part of any scientific research. The secondary publication Current Contents, which was then published weekly in a paper format, offered an overview of contents of various journals and listed addresses of authors, who usually responded to readers’ reprint requests and, in a collegial manner, shared print copies of their articles free of charge. To this end, many had their own postal cards made. In this article, we recall and present these communication practices so as to bring to awareness the immense progress made in the literature search, which is important part of any research.