Another long blogging hiatus. I can offer the same excuses as last time, plus a new one: I was told off after the last entry. Oh well! You live and learn, I guess.

This time, it’s this article in Science that captured my imagination. In it, James Evans analyzed a database of 34 million articles to show that, as more journal issues have gone online, the articles currently cited tend to be more recent, fewer, and come from fewer journals.

Evans argues that print journals forced scientists to do more browsing, perhaps stretching scientists to anchor findings more deeply into past advances. He also argues that, sure, searching online is a more efficient way of putting you in touch with the prevailing views in your field. The price we pay, though, is that such “narrowing of science and scholarship” (borrowing from Evans’ title) may accelerate consensus and impose limits on the range of ideas upon which we build scientific progress.

This is a fascinating contribution that, needless to say, I would find very difficult to formally evaluate. Yet, an intriguing question formed in my mind: is there a strict causal relationship between journals going online and this narrowing of scholarship, or are there other factors that explain that fewer, newer papers that come from fewer journals are being cited? In all fairness to Evans, he didn’t make any claims regarding a strict causal relationship, and he didn’t say that his observations fully accounted for the current citation pattern. Still, a provocative exercise is to think about other factors that may explain the trends he identified.

In terms of citing newer papers, I suspect that technical advances have a lot to do with that. For example, the advent of transgenic and knockout mice represented a turning point for biology. You can now obtain much more definitive answers about the function of a molecule if you have a knockout than before, when all you could hope for was having a more or less specific antagonist. It wouldn’t be surprising if advances of this sort have modified the citing behavior of a scientist writing a paper.

Regarding the citation of fewer papers, some studies have shown that many people tend not to read the references they cite, but simply copy them from other papers that have cited them—a behavior that one could refer to as “meta-referencing”. Also, I have anecdotal evidence of people who don’t cite anything that isn’t in PubMed. For example, when a referee asks an author to cite the classic papers from Dr. Smith from the 1950s, it’s not that uncommon to hear that they “couldn’t cite them because the abstract wasn’t in PubMed”.

So, the whole universe of citable papers does not extend beyond the 1970s, and many of us cite papers even though we haven’t read them, just because someone else did. And we haven’t even talked about the proliferation of review articles, in which you often find the authors citing other reviews on the same topic—a behavior one could refer to as “meta-reviewing”. No wonder few papers get the benefit of a citation.

The last point has to do with the observation that we now tend to cite papers from fewer journals. A first corollary of this fact is that the journals that publish the papers that garner those highly coveted citations will have the highest impact factors. A second corollary is that, if fewer journals have most of the citations, this would predict that we will see an ever increasing gap between the impact factors of the high-profile and the more specialized journals. In socioeconomic terms, we will see a widening gap between the wealthy and the poor at the expense of the middle class.

From where I sit, this prediction seems to be proving right. Back in the 1980s, when I started in research, publishing your work in any international journal truly represented the crystallization of a lot of work. So, even though you didn’t get your paper in Science or Nature, it didn’t matter so much because your small contribution, however humble, still counted for something to those working in the same field as you. These days, some journals in which I published my work are largely ignored by the community, which tends to think about them as “places in which you publish your work after everything else fails”. In fact, some people prefer to store the paper in the filing cabinet before publishing in some journals that have come to be too specialized for their taste.

As for the current middle class, the journals that aren’t regarded as high profile but are very solid publications that demand a lot from authors — those journals where you immediately send your paper after the “vanity” journals turned you down — are constantly trying to improve their image and position themselves in such a way that they are also perceived as high profile, quite often with great success. This is, of course, a very smart thing to be doing because, as the gap between rich and poor widens, you don’t want to be caught on the wrong side of the divide.

To end, I thought I’d paste Evans’ last paragraph, which also fed my imagination, triggering associations that I may share in a future post:

“The move to online science appears to represent one more step on the path initiated by the much earlier shift from the contextualized monograph, like Newton’s Principia or Darwin’s Origin of Species, to the modern research article. The Principia and Origin, each produced over the course of more than a decade, not only were engaged in current debates, but wove their propositions into conversation with astronomers, geometers, and naturalists from centuries past. As 21st-century scientists and scholars use online searching and hyperlinking to frame and publish their arguments more efficiently, they weave them into a more focused—and more narrow—past and present.”

Photo of Newton @ Madame Tussauds by Colaco. Scan of Darwin portrait by cpurrin1.