When we look at someone's research findings, I've expressed concern about the perils of placing too much emphasis on who gets lots of citations, and not enough on who makes a meaningful contribution to society (see How do you measure importance?). But still, using citation analysis, we can learn a lot by looking at patterns in who cites who as a reference, how many different sources of evidence people are referencing, etc. This tells us something about how people spread new knowledge, even beyond academia. New evidence sheds light on how research patterns have changed as more publications have become available online. James A. Evans completed a sophisticated statistical analysis of index data from 6,000 highly cited journals in science, social science, and humanities. His findings appear in Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship in the latest issue of Science.
Quoting from the abstract: "Online journals promise to serve more information to more dispersed audiences and are more efficiently searched and recalled. But because they are used differently than print -- scientists and scholars tend to search electronically and follow hyperlinks rather than browse or peruse -- electronically available journals may portend an ironic change for science. ...I show that as more journal issues came online, the articles referenced tended to be more recent, fewer journals and articles were cited, and more of those citations were to fewer journals and articles. ...Searching online is more efficient and following hyperlinks quickly puts researchers in touch with prevailing opinion, but this may accelerate consensus and narrow the range of findings and ideas built upon." Lots of influential sites have picked up on the story, including TechDirt, ars Technica, and Wired ...which probably means the article will be cited more and more widely :-)
Efficient? Or scary? I think it's good that online journals make it easier for people to skip over stuff that doesn't seem interesting. The pressure to publish-or-perish has resulted in many studies that don't really move the ball forward, or are perhaps false (see my post The truth is filed away somewhere. Meanwhile, most published research findings are false.). But do you want someone else deciding for you what's useful and what's not? (I'm not sure it's such a good idea to apply The Wisdom of Crowds concept to the evaluation of cutting-edge science.) Part of Evans' conclusion is that "[People] view others' choices as relevant information -- a signal of quality -- and factor them into their own reading and citation selections.... Findings and ideas that do not become consensus quickly will be forgotten quickly. This research ironically intimates that one of the chief values of print library research is poor indexing."
Little difference between for-free and for-fee. Evans found a "collective similarity" between free-access and subscription-based journals, suggesting "that online access -- whatever its source -- reshapes knowledge discovery and use in the same way."
Like it or not, this is the age of specialization. I agree with Evans statement that "By drawing researchers through unrelated articles, print browsing and perusal may have facilitated broader comparisons and led researchers into the past. Modern graduate education parallels this shift in publication -- shorter in years, more specialized in scope, culminating less frequently in a true dissertation than an album of articles."
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