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| Does Electronic Access To Research Publications Restrain Scientific Diversity? |
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| SciMed - Horizons | |||
| TS-Si News Service | |||
| Sunday, 20 July 2008 17:00 | |||
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."
 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.
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.
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."
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Does Electronic Access To Research Publications Restrain Scientific Diversity? Sunday, 20 July 2008
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are collaborations of TS-Si officials, staff, contributors, and corresponding institutions. Contents do not necessarily convey official positions of
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