Sifting Through the Online Web of Knowledge

This essay examines how researchers gain access to knowledge at a time when scholarly communication and materials are increasingly moving online. This topic has so far mainly been discussed in terms of journal publication and readership. Here we take a broader view, including a variety of areas where knowledge production and dissemination is broader than journal publications and includes data and tools. A second reason to take a broader view extends the horizon still further, since scientific communication and collaboration are not just undergoing change within the research community, but also depend on wider changes such as the use of search engines and how they affect what can be found online generally. New search behaviours are particularly evident among a new generation of scholars and potential scholars. Hence we will look at changes in research as well as in the realm of online knowledge more broadly.