Legal Research

The long tail of scientific research

By emma wood

Via Library Link of the Day, there’s a really interesting article in the July 17th edition of The Economist entitled “Great minds think (too much) alike“. The article describes research that shows how digital access to scientific journals doesn’t necessarily encourage use of long tail information. Sociologist Dr James Evans:

“has found that as more journals become available online, fewer articles are being cited in the reference lists of the research papers published within them. Moreover, those articles that do get a mention tend to have been recently published themselves. Far from growing longer, the long tail is being docked.”

My reaction is that this is somewhat analogous to the average user not looking past the first page (first ten results) in Google. The other day, I watched a friend of mine try to search for some basic instructional information on the internet. If within the first few results, she didn’t see what she was looking for, she’d immediately change her search terms. I made some suggestions for different terms and what order to put them in, and she had a bit more luck, but we still had to look at more than a couple hits to find what she was looking for. (It’s pretty satisfying when you can put your madd library skillz to use outside of work!)

On the whole, we are growing more and more impatient and unwilling to spend any time to find high-quality information. This isn’t news, obviously, but it’s something I need to remind myself of, too - because I know I do it even though I know better. I loved the quote that ends the article:

“As a wag once put it, an expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less until, eventually, he knows everything about nothing. It would be ironic if that is the sort of expertise that the world wide web is creating.”

In the digital realm where, in theory, it should be easy to find highly specialised information about almost anything, we need to remind ourselves that good info doesn’t always float to the top. We still have to go digging for it, be critical of it, and not assume we are experts about any of it.

Full post as published by Ballad in Plain E on August 11, 2008 (boomark / email).