Consensus in Academic Research

Online Resources Produce Myopia in Academia

Time strapped students, researchers and librarians alike find electronic resources invaluable in day to day academic needs. From a librarian's perspective, online articles are indexed in myriad of ways and therefore linked and searchable in any number of ways. With online searching Librarians can better serve patrons by finding information faster and more efficiently, to the delight of students and researchers alike. For the most part print is dead.

But, despite the efficiency, online resources may contribute to "group think" in academia, according to a study in Science. James Evans from the Sociology department at the University Chicago conducted a survey study on academic citations. The author begins from the premise that, in libraries, print use is decreasing. He uses citation statistics to then discover the effect of articles available online from conventional journals. In theory, Evans poses, the availability of scholarship online would broaden works cited in an academic paper. However, the citation data suggests otherwise.

In fact, access to conventional journals online, narrows the scope of works cited in academic research. Significantly, online indexing of articles allows researchers to assess "prevailing opinion," or number of times an article is cited, in a given field. (Evans 398) Even though archived articles enter a database, researchers tend to select recent scholarship over past articles, selecting articles directly related to their research rather than those articles marginally related. Evans also points out that scientists are also browsing topics with online searches instead of perusing print sources.

The author sums up, inspired by a New York Times article on the subject of higher education. "Modern graduate education parallels this shift in [scholarly] publication -- shorter in years, more specialized in scope, culminating less frequently in a true dissertation than an album of articles." (Evans 398) Evans suggests that even though print is cumbersomeness, it may provide a better means to access past research for scientists and students, and I would add Librarians. Perusing print forces researchers to examine articles less related to the topic at hand. In this way, works cited are expanded and so too are the ideas of researchers.


Evans, James, A. "Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship." Science. 321.5887 (2008): 395 - 399.