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Chicago, IL, USA. Scientists and scholars must document their sources in professional publications, but can there be an objective standard for their number and diversity? A sociologist implies as much by analyzing how rapid access to increasing numbers of academic journals has narrowed citations to fewer and more recent papers.
James Evans is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, who focuses on the nature of scholarly research. He argues in Science that electronic access, in particular, has restrained diversity, limiting the creation of new ideas and theories.
Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship. James A. Evans. Science 2008 321(5887) 395-399. doi: 10.1126 / science.1150473.
This line of questioning began for Evans 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 says. Evans says "That's where this idea came from. I wanted to know how electronic provision changed science, not how much better it made it."
When Evans reviewed sientific research on the Internet, he discovered that most of it focused on how much faster and broader scholars could search for information, but not how the medium itself was impacting their work. He analyzed a database of over 34 million articles and compared their online availability from 1998 to 2005 against the number of times they were cited from 1945 to 2005.
As more journal issues came online, the articles cited were fewer in number and more recent. 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."
Evans's research also found that this trend was not evenly distributed across academic disciplines.
Scientists and scholars in the life sciences showed the greatest propensity for referencing fewer articles.
The trend is less noticeable in business and legal scholarship.
Social scientists and scholars in the humanities are more likely to cite newer works than other disciplines.
So what is it about doing research online versus in a bricks-and-mortar library that changes the literature review so critical to research? Evans has identified a few possible explanations.
Studies into how research is conducted show that people browse and peruse material in a library, but they tend to search for articles online.
Online searches tend to organize results by date and relevance, which leads scholars and scientists to pick recent research from the most high profile journals.
Some search tools like Google factor the frequency with which other users select an item during similar searchers to determine relevance.
Online, researchers are also more likely to follow hyper-linked references and links to similar work within an online archive.
Because of this, as more scholars choose to read and reference a given article, future researchers more quickly follow.
Evans doesn't think this phenomenon will spell the end of the literature review. The more important implication for Evans is that it makes scholars and scientists more likely to come to a consensus. This, in turn, can establish a conventional wisdom on a given topic faster than ever before.
"Online access facilitates a convergence on what science is picked up and built upon in subsequent research." The danger in this, he believes, is that if new productive ideas and theories aren't picked up quickly by the research community, they may fade before their useful impact is evaluated. "It's like new movies. If movies don't get watched the first weekend, they're dropped silently," Evans said.
Evans plans to work with linguists and computer scientists to explore how ideas are expressed in articles to better understand what the consequences of losing old ideas are and how they can be retrieved and resurrected, a challenge he sees as being important in the pursuit of knowledge. "With science and scholarship increasing online, findings and ideas that don't receive attention very soon will be forgotten more quickly than ever before."
Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship. James A. Evans. Science 2008 321(5887) 395-399. doi: 10.1126 / science.1150473.
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. Using a database of 34 million articles, their citations (1945 to 2005), and online availability (1998 to 2005), 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. The forced browsing of print archives may have stretched scientists and scholars to anchor findings deeply into past and present scholarship. 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.
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The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.
John Maynard Keynes
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (13 December 1935)
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