Well, we don’t know that. The prevailing assumption was that we would enter “herrliche Zeiten”, to quote Kaiser Wilhelm…”wondrous times”. The consequences of such abundance could only be good, right? Well, let’s see. An article in the July 18 issue of Science reports on research conducted by sociologist James Evans of UChi. He analyzed citation behavior and came to the conclusion that more and more citations are being made to fewer and more recent journals in a kind of convergence pattern, even though the journals may have a lot of digitized content from earlier publication years. He theorizes that this pattern may lead to rapid emergence of bogus scientific consensus, which would not occur if more publications over a longer time span were consulted. The sense that practitioners are united on a point may be an illusion, because they represent too small and too recent a segment of the total scholarly record. The inverse of that is the possibility that important, dissenting papers will be overlooked, thus adding to the impression of consensus which is not justified. Others disagree and say that user behavior is closer to the predicted style, in which scholars extend their reading both across the number of journals read and further back in time.
Science
The Economist and Nature News have interesting takes on the Evans study, suggesting that the reliance on electonic discovery and retrieval has replaced browsing through print issues to the degree that serendipitous discovery of important work doesn’t happen as easily as it did before.
Economist
Nature
It’s not really clear what’s going on, or if people are asking the right questions. Some commentators are wondering about that very thing and have views you can read here:
Evans