Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship

Online journals promise to serve more information to more dispersed audiences and are more efficiently searched and recalled. But because they are used differently than print-scientists and scholars tend to search electronically and follow hyperlinks rather than browse or peruse-electronically available journals may portend an ironic change for science. Using a database of 34 million articles, their citations (1945 to 2005), and online...