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Published online 17 July 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.960
Column: Muse
Who says the Internet broadens your horizons?
Online access to scientific journals can be a mixed blessing, as Philip Ball finds out.
It's a rare scientist these days who does not know his or her citation index, most commonly in the form of the h-index introduced in 2005 by physicist Jorge Hirsch1. Proposed as a measure of the cumulative impact of one's published works, such citation metrics are increasingly being used to evaluate researchers' careers.
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One upside that this ignores is the availability of RSS feeds with journal contents (either "ASAP" or "current issue"). It makes it far easier to keep abreast of a broad range of journals - with links to instantly read any article that catches your eye. Search engines are not the only entrypoint into the online literature.
The attempt to procure online published work is rapidly increasing, no doubt but this has its own merits & demerits. Most of the online references are recent publications, so old literature does not find place in most of the bibliographies. Moreover, researchers do tend to drag on with the same literature. However, there are developing countries where the print version of journals are unavailable, and due to the copyright protection online material ...just exceeds its data unto the abstract. Being a researcher & a lecturer myself, I have often seen students lacking the interest to study in the library. Moreover, the journal and thesis sections of most universities and colleges gather dust. Thanks to the online literature... its no longer a literature hunt but a literature surf
Contrary to the article, it seems to me that I (as well as my undergraduate peers) am more likely to read a broader range of topics given that journals are now online. At the very least, I read abstracts of studies in fields outside my area of interest (genetics and medicine), since they are easily available for my perusal. I would certainly not read these otherwise since it is too difficult to keep up with the wider variety of journals nowadays in many various disciplines and subdisciplines. If I needed to search through a whole journal in order to find an article of interest, I would be much less likely to spend a few minutes here and there to see what's going on with the field since I would be devoting a much greater time to even finding my article of interest. However, I certainly agree with the idea of diminishing shelf-life, especially since many of my professors have required that I cite journal articles from the past 5 years in lab reports and papers. Certainly there are more articles hidden in the archives that are more applicable at times, and yet the push is that only newer articles are so.
The ability to access abstracts online is useful, but can be problematic. Many people, including journalists, fail to read the entire paper and therefore may interpret a study incorrectly. Abstracts of papers also fail to report conflict of interest. This is often mentioned in the full paper but missed by those who rely only on access to the abstract. Obviously, people should read the full paper, but it would also help if all abstracts also noted any conflict of interest. Dr Rosemary Stanton
The comments from Indian scientists remind me of the difficulties I had when working in Tanzania in the 1970s, in an animal science institute with a very a limited and gappy range of journals. A "literature search" involved checking the monthly issues of Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux' abstracting journals, followed by a reprint request to a neighbouring country or a 7-hour journey to the university library. Searching using the internet would now be a joy. Narrowness of search can be overcome by making the searches more open-ended (and taking the time to select!), and by using abstract databases that go back some decades (PubMed, a free-access database, goes back 20 years, and CAB(I) abstracts even further). But getting the full article electronically in developing countries is still difficult unless one's institution is large enough to justify journal subscriptions or one has easy access to foreign exchange.
Very good news Tony! PubMed now goes back to 1950 for its citations. MedlinePlus, [medlineplus.gov], its consumer health online service, now has a new feature that translates its consumer health materials in many more languages, in addition to Spanish. This latter feature has been a great online educational resource within my local area, with our Asian community, and especially our Hmong neighbors in improving the quality of care they receive from our hosptial clinicians. They are very happy to learn that they can have free access to this material anywhere and anytime they need it. It is probably the best free service supported by our tax payer dollars. F. Landry - Medical Librarian. N. Central Mass.
Electronics access to journals has increased the number of references I include in papers because it has increased the number of published papers which I have access to by at least an order of magnitude over my university's small print collection. I agree that electronic access will increase the number of references to newer papers at the expense of older ones because more recent journals are more likely to be online. However, this will change as more and more articles become available electronically. A. Katz
Access to online publications does not mean only the journal articles. Now we are getting better access to 'grey literature' going back to several decades. These include proceedings of seminars, conferences, institute reports, UN documents etc. This means we get a broader perspective overall than browsing library shelves. One aspect the author has missed is that the number of citations you get depends a lot on the area of research one works. For example, in plant science if one publishes in wheat, rice or maize, the chances of getting cited is much higher than if you work in an indegenous tropical crop of limited use, no matter how good the publication is. Ranjith Pathirana
We do actually experience a flood of data flux at our finger tips than would ever be possible to be provided by a library in a developing country simply depending on print versions. Proportionally citations should logically go up contrary to what the reported study and its findings would prompt one to think. Any way many studies arrive at their conclusions based on assumptions and corroborative evidence while often discounting conflicting information and data or claims.This is a universal affliction for all new and emerging areas particularly and availability of a dense flux of abstract information and free publications online could reduce the bias due to the above mentioned logical skew. Of course archival information is important when it comes to more established notions in science and mature areas where new research findings may accumulate marginally at a slower pace unless paradigm shifts occur.The flexibility for meta analysis and cross reference studies that the online data flux provide can improve the rate of change even in mature areas of science through greater probability for cross-fertilisation incidence ,more frequently, as facilitated by online surfing. All said and done the proof of the cake is in the eating, and so science development and impact need not just be measured based only on factors which reflect more traditional reading and citation aspects: what potentially flows over to the field as application is equally or more important ,and internet has definitely increased the application effectiveness of kowledge potential,even if actual citations have decreased as reported in the study SURERSHKMAR.S,SCIENTIST AND HEAD,PLANNING,NIIST,CSIR,TRIVANDRUM,KERALA,INDIA
Access to online journals has revolutionised the way we do science here at the tip of Africa: our University library has access to an astonishing number of e-journals and online versions of print journals, thanks to various initiatives that aim at increasing developing country access. The upshot of this is that our students (and us) can now search in real time through the vastnesses of the Web, access abstracts - and stand a decent chance of getting the article online immediately, as opposed to writing a reprint request to be sent by snail mail. If we don;t have access, this is ususally solved by return of an email to the corresponding author, requesting a PDF file.
PS: we still have a journal club (six at last count in one Department) to teach students how to write as opposed to read.<p> Ed Rybicki<p> Dept Mol & Cell Biol<p> Univ Cape Town<p>