Online articles lead to rapid scientific consensus, forgotten ideas

The results of the explosion of easily available articles, according to Evans, is that “researchers can more easily find prevailing opinion, they are more likely to follow it, leading to more citations referencing fewer articles.

As a side effect of this, a scientific consensus will typically form more rapidly. The other side of this is that papers containing ideas that don’t catch quickly will be forgotten by the scientific world much faster.

Here’s another side-effect of the web.  Few articles are being cited, and what is popular tends to draw more attention from researchers.  This is similar to the effect of people visiting sites that represent them as opposed to sites that expressed different opinions to themselves.  I just hope this doesn’t result in group think–where researchers neglect to look at the dissenting, smaller voices to the detriment of new discoveries or correct science.