Jane's Information Group (often referred to as Jane's) is a publishing company specializing in transportation and military topics, which was founded by Fred T. Jane in 1898. Jane began by sketching ships as an enthusiast, and this gradually developed into an encyclopedic knowledge, culminating in the publishing of All the World's Fighting Ships. The company Jane founded gradually branched out into other arenas of military expertise. The books and trade magazines published by Jane's are often considered the de facto public source of information on warfare and transportation systems.
Occurrences in fiction:
- In Full Metal Panic!, Sousuke and Shinji drool over the latest Jane's guides to Arm Slaves.
- It apparently still exists in the Honor Harrington series 2,000 years later, as the diagrams of weaponry and ships in the more recent novels are labeled as being from Jane's.
- Several excellent video games were created when Jane's teamed up with Electronic Arts and lent its name to games based on various pieces of military hardware in the late 1990s. One of them, JASF: Jane's Advanced Strike Fighters, is available on Steam.
- The manuals for the Wing Commander games that had ship stats were citing "Joan's Fighting Spacecraft", an obvious nod to the Janes line.
- The Fan Fic Misery Senshi Neo Zero Double Blitzkrieg Debacle, a Sailor Moon/Daria crossover in a Tom Clancy-esque vein, includes an acknowledgment of some of this publisher's works in its Fanfic Header.
- The Star Risk, Ltd. team keeps a copy of Jane's Starships of the Galaxy in their main office.
