That's the headline in The Economist about this paper in the 18 July issue of Science. James Evans from the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago studied a database including over 34 million citations to articles from 1945 to 2005. He studied the relationship between citation patterns and the availability of journals online. You'd expect citations to increase both in frequency and in breadth of coverage as journals came online.1 But that's not what he found.- The longer a journal has been available online, the younger the average age of its articles that are cited.
- As more articles became available online, fewer were cited.
These changes likely mean that the shift from browsing in print to searching online facilitates avoidance of older and less relevant literature. Moreover, hyperlinking through an online archive puts experts in touch with consensus about what is the most important prior work--what work is broadly discussed and referenced. With both strategies, experts online bypass many of the marginally related articles that print researchers skim.The Economist puts it differently:
As a wag once put it, an expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less until, eventually, he knows everything about nothing. It would be ironic if that is the sort of expertise that the world wide web is creating.
The web is changing the way we work. Online searches lack the serendipity of paging through a journal. I know there are things I'm missing now that I would have stumbled across twenty years ago when a weekly pilgrimage to the new journals section of the library was a part of my routine. But I also know there are things I'm finding now I would never have found then, because it was too much trouble to look them up. I probably am looking at fewer sources, but I'm using those sources much more effectively and more frequently. I just hope I don't end up knowing everything about nothing.
1After all I can now sit at my desk and search through online databases far more efficiently than I could work with a reference librarian 25 years ago for an automated literature search.
Evans, J.A. (2008). Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship. Science, 321(5887), 395-399. DOI: 10.1126/science.1150473
1After all I can now sit at my desk and search through online databases far more efficiently than I could work with a reference librarian 25 years ago for an automated literature search.
Evans, J.A. (2008). Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship. Science, 321(5887), 395-399. DOI: 10.1126/science.1150473
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