Cambridge Scientific Abstracts
American database company
Cambridge Scientific Abstracts (later simply CSA) was a division of Cambridge Information Group and provider of online databases, based in Bethesda, Maryland, before merging with ProQuest of Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 2007. CSA hosted databases of abstracts and developed taxonomic indexing of scholarly articles. These databases were hosted on the CSA Illumina platform and were available alongside add-on products like CSA Illustrata (deep-indexing of tables and figures). The company produced numerous bibliographic databases in different fields of the arts and humanities, natural and social sciences, and technology.
Thus, coverage included materials science, environmental sciences and pollution management, biological sciences, aquatic sciences and fisheries, biotechnology, engineering, computer science, sociology, linguistics, and other areas.
Aluminium Industry Abstracts
Aluminium Industry Abstracts (AIA) was formerly known as World Aluminum Abstracts (WAA). Topical coverage in the technical literature includes aluminum, production processes, products, applications, and business applications. Coverage of the sources include periodicals, technical reports, conference proceedings, patents, trade journals, press releases, and books.
Subject coverage, in broad categories, of this database is the aluminum industry (including end uses of aluminum), aluminum intermetallics, business information, engineering testing and properties, extractive metallurgy, melting, casting, and foundry, metalworking, extraction, patents, metallurgy engineering, and quality control (including testing).
Ceramic Abstracts
CSA publishes Ceramic Abstracts / World Ceramics Abstracts in conjunction with CERAM Research Ltd.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Cambridge Scientific Abstracts” is american database company. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Cambridge, Scientific and Abstracts, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “american database company” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5014024. VIAF identifies the subject as 125993931. The Library of Congress control number is n50058872. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2007.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Cambridge Scientific Abstracts”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Cambridge Scientific Abstracts primary sources, Cambridge Scientific Abstracts archive and Cambridge research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Cambridge Scientific Abstracts”?
- Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
- Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Cambridge Scientific Abstracts” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.