We will start with a rapid summary of the papers found in this special issue of Scientometrics. It should then be easier to identify and discuss the more characteristic traits of French research in this area. Davoust and Schmadel are professional astronomers. They have been struck by the rapid growth of information published in their discipline over the past thirty years. Can this rate of growth be explained by the ways in which astronomical research is organized and, inversely, to what extent is the increasing flow of scientific information changing research practices? Their paper can be seen as an attempt to develop appropriate statistical measures that might be useful in answering this double question. A similar concern to better understand the relationship between available human resources and overall achievement is found in the Le Mbfor//Dostatni paper. They built an "in-house bibliometric database" for their Institute, the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research (INSERM). This database creates a link between the Institute's personnel file and a file of publications containing downloaded INSERM references from MEDLINE and the Science Citation Index. The authors used this "in-house database" to explore a wide range of policy questions connected to INSERM's mission of promoting research, knowledge transfer and innovation in the biomedical field. Much of their discussion concerns the general problem of evaluating the quality of information sources for science policy and planning. Do bibliographical databases permit to follow changes in the development of a research front? This question is raised in the paper by Jagodzinski-Sigogneau et al. The research front studied is described in the Science Atlas of Biomedicine that was published by ISI in 1982. The authors show how a co-citation analysis can be completed by the use of on-line tools now available for browsing the more traditional key-word indexed databases such as the INIST/CNRS PASCAL database. These online techniques appear to be of particular interest in determining the social and cognitive boundaries that serve to define the content of a research front.