"What is the effect of online availability of journal issues? It is possible that by making more research more available, online searching could conceivably broaden the work cited and lead researchers, as a collective, away from the "core" journals of their fields and to dispersed but individually relevant work. I will show, however, that even as deeper journal back issues became available online, scientists and scholars cited more recent articles; even as more total journals became available online, fewer were cited." - Thomas Lemberger

Ideally. Shouldn't matter where good work is published as long as it can be found, with relevance driven by some metric - Deepak Singh

I agree. But there is not only the problem of finding 'good' work but also to be aware of 'diverse' research. Searching and browsing are complementary strategies in this regard. Apparently online publishing favors 'search' versus browsing and thus restricts the scope of citations/knowledge. Probably a good reason to promote RSS aggregators! - Thomas Lemberger

I cannot help but wonder if this has anything to do with electronic publication, or if it is simply an effect of sheer volume. If researchers have to search through ten times as many articles (because of the exponential growth of the literature), is it really surprising that they don't make it as far back into the past as they used to do? - Lars Juhl Jensen