What are we Missing?

Our college recently implemented a unified search tool to search for journal articles across several journal databases.  This new search tool has saves me a lot of time but I noticed that I often only scan through the first page or two of results.  I wondered what I was missing out on by skipping the remaining pages of partially relevant results.


I recently read an article by Evens (2008) that addressed this very concern.  This author noted as journal articles are published online and become part of these databases, scholars search rather than browse as a method to locate sources of information.  Evans found this trend resulted in a smaller subset of articles referenced in publications and the referenced articles were newer than articles published prior to searchable journal databases.  The author concluded the search results first display recent articles that are most relevant and, as a result, older and less directly relevant articles are not found or used by researchers.  The conclusion was recent research is based on a smaller set of sources and typically relies on a disproportional amount of newer sources.

Evans, J.A. (2008). Electronic publication and the narrowing of science and scholarship. Science, 321(5887), 395-399.