The Use of Electric-Only Journals in Scientific Research

Abstract

Journals that are published exclusively in electronic format present an innovation in the way that scientific information is communicated to the research community. Significant concerns remain regarding the impermanence of materials in electronic formats and the use of innovative features of electronically formatted material. It has taken some time for the e-only journals to become integrated into scientific information systems, indexed by major services, appear in library catalogs, or cited by other researchers. This article surveys the current place of the e-only journal within the information system. The use of print journals has developed over several centuries and during that time these journals have evolved in specialized ways to fulfill their primary activities. Rowland (1997) describes the four major functions of a scholarly journal as: Dissemination of information Quality control, Canonical archives, and Recognition of authors. Electronic journals were first suggested some years ago as a possible means of revolutionizing the world of research journals. Electronic journals could be distributed more economically than paper journals, because the main costs of preparing the text, the review process and other like procedures are not as capital intensive as the costs of printing and mailing print copies. Consequently, it was hoped that the financial costs of journals in the electronic environment could slow or reverse the escalating costs of scientific journals. Accessing print journal articles has long involved a number of methods including the use of a variety of both specialized and general indexes, library catalogs, references/citing from other articles, and recommendations from readers and colleagues. When electronic journals first appeared they fell outside the formal communication patterns, especially that of journal indexes and library catalogs. This caused concern about respectability and archival access. Our study hypothesized that for electronic-only journals to become a part of the traditional scholarly system of research they must be included with other journal articles in the major academic indexes, included in library catalogs, and cited by authors in established research journals. We set out to determine:

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Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.