As more journal articles go online, only more recent articles tend to be cited, according to a linkurl:study published today;http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/321/5887/395 in Science. In addition, only a small group of journals and articles are being cited, the study found. linkurl:James Evans,;http://sociology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty/evans.shtml a sociologist at the University of Chicago, surveyed a database of 34 million articles, their citations over the past 50 years, and their online availability. Evans' results suggest that online literature searches yield more recent articles, and cause researchers to cite a less broad and diverse range of articles. Not everyone agrees. linkurl:Carol Tenopir,;http://web.utk.edu/~tenopir/ a professor of information sciences at the University of Tennessee, told linkurl:The Chronicle of Higher Education;http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/07/3870n.htm that her group has found exactly the opposite result when it comes to how many papers researchers are reading. According to her research, which studies when researchers read articles as opposed to cite them, the number of...
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