obert Broadus' paper on the use of Journal Citation Reports (JCR) for reducing periodical subscriptions is interesting, but like other papers on this topic it misses a crucial practical issue. Stephen Bensman's paper is equally interesting; some of the comments below apply to it also. Librarians want to know (1) what periodicals to cancel if they are short of funds and (2) what additional titles to buy. For both purposes, apart from new titles in the case of (2), they are concerned with titles at the fringe of use. While citation rank lists may not correlate badly with local use of all periodicals held, the correlation grows weaker as one goes further down the lists. This is inevitable if only because the number of citations or uses at the fringes is small or very small. It is a matter of chance whether a little-used or little-cited title receives, in any one year, zero, one, two, three, four, or five uses or citations, although the rank order may be dramatically affected. Broadus admits that JCR are only a rough guide for identifying low-use periodicals. I doubt if it is of much use even as a rough guide. Not only may little-cited periodicals be retained for various reasons, as he says-among them special local interest; but some highly cited periodicals, which would not be picked out by his procedure, may easily be very little used in a local library, because they are marginal to its interests. One library's (or database's) core is another's fringe. The rank order of periodicals requested from the British Library Lending Division shows a low stability over time.' 2 There was between 1975 and 1980 only 55 percent overlap in the top one thousand titles, and between 1980 and 1983 (a shorter period) only 60 percent. It would be interesting to study the stability of rank lists of periodicals in order of use in a few academic or special libraries; my guess is that stability would be little if any better than at the British Library Lending Division, since the clientele changes, and subject interests and emphases of existing users change (my personal rank list of periodicals in order of use changes from year to year). Over large numbers of users, individual changes might perhaps be expected to be submerged in an overall consistency, but the Lending Division evidence suggests that this does not happen. If there is instability of use over quite