Much is made these days of the increase in activity in carbohydrate chemistry and
of the emergence of glycobiology as a major branch of biochemistry, and while
such data as attendances at conferences and the nature of programmes at the
meetings bear these out, this Specialist Periodical Report offers an alternative
means of quantifying the changes. In the table, numbers of papers abstracted in
this series under different chapter headings are given for volumes 10, 15, 20, 25
and 30, these exemplifying the literature published between 1976 and 1996. Since
the criteria used for selecting papers to be noted here remained the same over the
period (the intention being to cite every relevant publication), the data certainly
confirm the view that the subject has boomed in the last 20 years. While the
overall volume of publication of relevant papers has gone up almost linearly, the
1976 number of papers doubling in the following 10 years and almost tripling in
20 years, the growth has been anything but even across the subject, and the
excitement associated with the new-found significances in biology is clearly
reflected in the attention that has been given to the synthesis of oligosaccharides
and other glycosidic compounds. The rate of growth in activity in the cyclitols is
likewise extreme, reflecting the biochemical importance of the inositol phos￾phates. Other increasingly favoured areas are nucleosides, nitrogen-containing
sugars and related compounds and sugar acids, all these groups of compounds
featuring importantly in topics related to matters of significance in biochemistry
and glycobiology.