Access to Online Journals Reduces Breadth of Citations, Study Finds

By Lila Guterman

[Editors' Note: This article has been revised and corrected since it was originally posted this morning.]

Scholars' access to more and more journal articles online may have had the perverse effect of slowing the steady increase in the number of citations of discrete articles, according to a study published today in Science. The unfortunate result may be to tamp down debate among researchers.

When journals began posting their archived issues online, the