Five leading abstracts services in the field of documentation were inspected. A measure of their coverage was obtained by matching the items of a bibliography against each service. All abstracts published by these services in 1964 were counted and ranked to estimate the scope of each service, to identify key journals and to assess the language problem. Leading journals were also identified by counts of citations following articles in nine leading documentation journals, mostly over a five‐year period. These citations were ranked in the same way as the abstracts in order to further identify key journals and to provide another view of the language barrier.