Research Publications Online: Too Much Of A Good Thing?

Science Daily

Thanks very much to Kat, who knows me soooooo well, for sending me this article from Science Daily. I'm not saying that I agree with it but I do like the fact that people are having the conversation:

The Internet gives scientists and researchers instant access to an astonishing number of academic journals. So what is the impact of having such a wealth of information at their fingertips? The answer, according to new research released July 18 in the journal Science, is surprising--scholars are actually citing fewer papers in their own work, and the papers they do cite tend to be more recent publications. This trend may be limiting the creation of new ideas and theories.

James Evans is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, who focuses on the nature of scholarly research. During a lecture on the influence of private industry money on research, a student instead asked how the growth of the Internet has shaped science. "I didn't have an immediate answer," Evans said in an interview last week.

When he reviewed the research on the Internet and science, Evans discovered that most of it focused on much faster and broader the Internet allows scholars to search for information, but not how the medium itself was impacting their work. "That's where this idea came from. I wanted to know how electronic provision changed science, not how much better it made it," he said.

After receiving support from the National Science Foundation to pursue this question, Evans analyzed a database of over 34 million articles and compared their online availability from 1998 to 2005 to the number of times they were cited from1945 to 2005. The results showed that as more journal issues came online, few articles were cited, and the ones that were cited tended to be more recent publications. Scholars also seemed to concentrate their citations more on specific journals and articles. "More is available," Evans said, "but less is sampled, and what is sampled is more recent and located in the most prominent journals."

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