I don't buy these arguments at all; his thesis is that easier + more efficient research = superficial + lazy + amateur. That's not how the web works for me. - Neil Saunders

Neil, I agree. Also, I think that the reason why people read a more narrow selection of articles now is 1) before they missed some highly relevant articles because of lack of indexing, and 2) there is so much more being published now that you simply have to narrow your focus to keep up with it. - Lars Juhl Jensen

Yup, Nicolas Carr is annoyingly wrong sometimes - Duncan Hull

The article he cites -- http://www.britannica.com/blogs... -- fails to answer the key questions it raises, i.e. if these phenomena really are occurring, how could they be? In particular, the time-locking of a drop in citation of old articles to when a journal moves online -- you could image this happening if, say, the editors shortened the preferred number of citations when they went online. In any case, it's not just emerging directly .... - j1m

...from the fact that the journal is online. (Rereading, I guess he's saying the phenomenon is time-locked to when journals moved online en masse, so my straw-man explanation wouldn't work.) And his explanations in terms of how researchers search the literature are hand-waving, but not very good hand-waving. - j1m

And so my love-hate relationship with the man continues. Disagree so much on this issue. - Deepak Singh