Introduction to the ISSCT Index

Inevitably, as one might expect, the contents of later Proceedings are different from the first published Proceedings, those of the 1924 Conference held in Hawaii. Continuous progress in science and technology will ensure that this pattern will be repeated in the future. Also, the style of presentation has changed dramatically during the years. These facts, but particularly the latter, have caused some problems in creating this index in a logical manner.

With the possible exception of sections such as Breeding, Entomology and Pathology, which have always retained their individuality from the early proceedings, there have been continual revisions to the classification system.

Agriculture, a dominant section in the earlier proceedings, has now been replaced by specific subject headings such as Agricultural Engineering, Fertilizers, Irrigation and Microbiology. A first attempt to break down the early Agriculture section into today's more specific sections ran into almost insuperable problems. Not only did the physical exercise of dismembering the original section create difficulties, it soon became apparent that doing so would have meant that a searching exercise would become more difficult instead of simpler.

The fairly recent introduction of Symposia into the Society's scope has created other problems in compiling a comprehensive index. The papers presented and discussed at these Symposia have been given their own significant, Roman style, page numbers in the recent Proceedings. Obviously this Roman style does not fit in well with the conventional, traditional style of numbering the proceedings. Primarily for this reason, these papers have not been included in the index at this stage.

The first index to the Proceedings was prepared in Mauritius by MSIRI for volumes I to X. Rather than start again, this was used as the basis for the early part of the index. There are some anomolies in it, including some papers which are indexed twice because they were considered to belong to two different Topics. These have been left and so may show up on some searches. Much of the indices were in American English spelling and so, as far as possible, the entire index has been set out with this spelling. However, if you cannot find what you want with one spelling, do try another.