The Economist ran an interesting piece in the July 19th print edition about the digitization of information and its effects on scholarly production. You can read it here: Great Minds Think (Too Much) Alike.
According to the article, a sociologist at the University of Chicago investigated the process and quality of research in this technological age and found that as more and more scholarly journals and their archives appear online, the scope and variety of citation in published articles has declined. In fact, the deeper the online archive is, the less likely it is that earlier articles will be used. Which is counterintuitive as the ease of access and culture of Web 2.0 would actually seem to contribute to the variety and texture of scholarly citation. What do we make of this?
The author of The Economist article speculates why this might be so:
It's as if there is still a latent belief that we must descend into the depths, into the basements, into the catacombs, the libraries, the stacks, passing by gatekeepers and guardians and an entire class of experts trained in their cataloguing and the maintenance of the bureaucracy of access. We don't trust that information has turned into light, that it is transmitted by wave and particle and not requisitioned by slip. If this were true, it would man that academia would be the last of the institutions of culture and society where this recognition has not become commonplace.
According to the article, a sociologist at the University of Chicago investigated the process and quality of research in this technological age and found that as more and more scholarly journals and their archives appear online, the scope and variety of citation in published articles has declined. In fact, the deeper the online archive is, the less likely it is that earlier articles will be used. Which is counterintuitive as the ease of access and culture of Web 2.0 would actually seem to contribute to the variety and texture of scholarly citation. What do we make of this?
The author of The Economist article speculates why this might be so:
Why this should be so remains unclear. It does not seem to have anything to do with economics. The same effect applied whether or not a journal had to be paid for. One explanation could be that indexing works by titles and authors alone, as happened with printed journals, forced readers to cast at least a cursory glance at work not immediately related to their own—or even that the mere act of flicking through a paper volume may have thrown up unexpected gems. This may have led people to make broader comparisons and to integrate more past results into their research.The comments below the article offer some more theories on this phenomenon (not often kindly to the author of the article). One reason for this change might be simply that people are still less likely to see something that they found online as being worthy or authoritative and thus are less likely to cite it. Especially if it comes from an age when it was not "naturally" digitized." The very speed and ease of access somehow makes the work we do seem suspicious and the objects we uncover especially frail. This perception is something that research communities, and tenure committees as well, the latter of which The Economist author mentions, will need to grapple with.
It's as if there is still a latent belief that we must descend into the depths, into the basements, into the catacombs, the libraries, the stacks, passing by gatekeepers and guardians and an entire class of experts trained in their cataloguing and the maintenance of the bureaucracy of access. We don't trust that information has turned into light, that it is transmitted by wave and particle and not requisitioned by slip. If this were true, it would man that academia would be the last of the institutions of culture and society where this recognition has not become commonplace.
