At the Seven Stones blog, Thomas Lemberger, an editor of Molecular Systems Biology_, discusses work by James Evans of the University of Chicago in Illinois ("_Science 321, 395–399; 2008":http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/321/5887/395) that shows how electronic publication has shifted citation patterns. Scientists now cite fewer papers overall, and tend to largely limit their citations to recently published work. This concentration on a smaller number of articles is hastening scientific consensus, with the implication that, as Evans writes, “Findings and ideas that do not become consensus quickly will be forgotten quickly.”
Lemberger notes that Evans’s study highlights two complementary strategies in information retrieval: finding relevant papers by targeted Internet searches versus staying informed on a broad range of topics by systematic browsing. He asks whether scientists are overlooking the importance of “good, old-fashioned table-of-content-skimming to stimulate cross-disciplinary thinking”. The increasing efficiency of search engines, RSS feeds and aggregators is useful, but so is continuous exposure to diversity.
Nature 454, x; 14 August 2008
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From the blogosphere by Maxine Clarke
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Citation patterns -- 14 August 2008
- Date:
- Monday, 18 Aug ust 2008 - 10:21 UTC
Last updated: Monday, 18 Aug 2008 - 10:21 UTC
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Comments
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This Science article has been discussed by the FriendFeed life scientists’ group.
See also this post by Martin Fenner.
Also further (critical) discussion on another Friendfeed thread and by Deepak Singh on bbgm
I find the methodology of Evans paper quite difficult to penetrate – which is a pity, because it clearly represents an important analysis of the growth in impact of online publishing. My comment is to question the validity of extrapolation from the statistical changes observed to changes in behaviour. Surely we are likely to be looking at several distinct epochs in terms of user response to the availability of online content and it doesn’t necessarily follow that these behavioral changes are continuous and thus amenable to a regression analysis. The really interesting period (in my opinion) began around a decade ago with the launch of products like Immunology Today Online and BioMedNet, and even within this shorter space of time there have clearly been massive changes in the way in which scientists use online information – some of which may be discipline-dependent. So it would be interesting to see a follow-up version of the analysis which focussed, say, only on the noughties and which contrasted the trends in, say, biomedicine and physics.