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Re:Online articles lead to rapid scientific consensus, forgo... by scott_s on Friday July 18, 2008 @03:01PM (#250084)
This is an interesting counter-point to another submission from today: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=249346
Re:Online articles lead to rapid scientific consensus, forgo... by Anon84 on Friday July 18, 2008 @04:20PM (#250170)
Not really. They complement each other. The one you showed claims (rightly so) that openness is a fundamental requisite for the progress of science. This one, shows how that openness results in more hits on the best papers on a given subject.

Think of it this way... even if you have easy access to 100x more papers than before, the number of citations that you put in your paper is still the same. This means that the you will try to pick the best references from the set you have available, which, in turn, will result in some particularly good papers being cited more often than they would otherwise.

Re:Online articles lead to rapid scientific consensus, forgo... by scott_s on Friday July 18, 2008 @04:43PM (#250186)
No, you're right, I just submitted the above before I finished reading this thread's article - I thought it was going in the opposite direction.