Is the Internet Bad for Science? Not really!

In continuing with the controversial blog posts about science, Wired has a preview of an article coming out in the prestigious journal Science, which hypothesizes that the Internet allows for such pinpoint precision in finding an article that researchers miss out on interesting topics because they don’t have to leaf through paper journals. The article author, James Evans, has data to back it up. From the article:

“As more journal issues came online, the articles referenced tended to be more recent, fewer journals and articles were cited, and more of the citations were to fewer journals and articles,” writes Evans, who analyzed the citation patterns of 34 million journal articles that went online between 1998 and 2005.

It’s an interesting hypothesis, and it makes some sense. The method I use for keeping up with research is to get e-mail alerts from the journals I read updating me with their new issues and sending me the Table of Contents. It is automatically sent, then I can scan the titles to find something interesting.

This has the benefit of keeping me up to speed on the most recent research, but does not let me find old research on a topic that may interest me. This the main points of the article, and that may be a shame. Literature reviews may just not be as thorough as they used to. Also, though, some sciences (such as cognitive psychology) have really exploded recently, and only the more current articles are the relevant ones. I tend to cite a few tried-and-true articles, but most of my literature review focuses on the recent stuff. I’m curious to see how it breaks down by the age of the field.

Still, food for thought.