Five abstracting and indexing services covering the field of political science were examined in order to ascertain if a causal relationship exists between how they are structured and how effective they are in producing citations on a given topic. Using the topics of communism, democracy, elections, and revolution, two hypotheses were formulated and tested. Hypothesis A postulated that the number of article citations for a given topic would rise in relation to an increase in the total number of journals covered by an abstracting and indexing publication. Hypothesis B postulated that the number of article citations for a given topic would rise in relation to an increase in the number of subject headings used for that topic. Data for each service during 1978 were tabulated. As a measure of correlation, a Pearson's r was calculated for each topic for both hypotheses. For hypothesis A none of the topics had a statistically significant level of correlation. The topics communism and revolution were found to be correlated after testing hypothesis B; that is, as the number of communism and revolution subject headings used by the services increased so the number of article citations increased. A 14-item bibliography concludes the report. (ESR)