is dedicated to the acceptance, medical treatment, and legal protection of individuals correcting the misalignment of their brains and their anatomical sex, while supporting their transition into society.
US Independence Day

Independence Day
TS-Si Headlines
Science-Medicine
Abstracts Added
DSM-V Update
DSM-V Update
 
Leave a comment.
 
See continuing updates on the APA, DSM, and the upcoming DSM Fifth Edition (DSM-V).
 
See our Annotated List of DSM-related news, research reports, analyses, and opinion pieces.
 
Visit the TS-Si Article Archive for reports on science, medicine, government, society, and other topics.
Living
Nation
Opinion

Join The Flow!

Email

Add to Google

Follow us on Twitter

Bookmark and Share
Leave a comment.
Does Electronic Access To Research Publications Restrain Scientific Diversity? Print E-mail
SciMed - Horizons
TS-Si News Service   
Sunday, 20 July 2008 17:00
Does Electronic Access To Research Publications Restrain Diversity?
TS-Si Science Enterprise
New Rochelle, NY, USA. A group of experts in various fields of medicine, public health, and industry propose that telemedicine (or information technology enhanced healthcare) must be a core component of a viable healthcare re...
Medford, MA, USA. In insurance, a death spiral happens when the cost of insurance goes so high that “regular” people stop buying insurance and only those most likely to claim continue to pay the premiums. That worsens th...
Washington, DC, USA. After Peter Giunta of West Chester, Pa., was laid off in December, the small landscaping company where he worked continued paying for his health insurance while his boss decided whether to bring him back ...
Washington, DC, USA. Faced with the high costs of transporting and escorting sick inmates to the doctor, states are expanding their use of videoconferencing to provide health consultations to prisoners without resorting to co...
Washington, DC, USA. As health officials across the country ramp up preparations to battle the swine flu, the head of a national coalition of state health officials warned Congress on April 28 that states could be in trouble ...
San Diego, CA, USA. A new analysis suggests that universal health insurance might not save many adult lives — or any — if the United States actually puts it into place. How many people in the United States who la...
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."
 
James Evans is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, who focuses on the nature of scholarly research.
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."
 


This research was funded in part by the US National Science Foundation  (NSF).

 


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.

 
TS-Si News ServiceThe TS-Si News Service is a collaborative effort by TS-Si.org editors, contributors, and corresponding institutions. The sources can include the cited individuals and organizations, as well as TS-Si.org staff contributions. Articles and news reports do not necessarily convey official positions of TS-Si, its partners, or affiliates. We welcome your comments. Use the form below to leave a public comment or send private correspondence via the TS-Si Contact Page. We will not divulge any personal details or place you on a mailing list without your permission.

 

Digg! Reddit! Del.icio.us! Mixx! Free and Open Source Software News Google! Live! Facebook! Slashdot! Technorati! StumbleUpon! MySpace! Spurl! Simpy! Newsvine! Blinklist! Furl! Fark! Blogmarks! Yahoo! Netvouz! Free Joomla PHP extensions, software, information and tutorials.

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites.

Comments (2)Add Comment
feedSubscribe to this comment's feed
min/maxShow/Hide comments
Are Online and Free Online Access Broadening or Narrowin
05 August 2008     
TS-Si and Open Access, Hi Stevan, thank you for dropping
05 August 2008     

Write comment
feedShow/Hide comment form

security code
Write the displayed characters


busy
< Prev   Next >
Last Updated on Sunday, 20 July 2008 17:39