Does Anyone Still Read Entire Journals?
by
Believe it or not, it wasn’t long ago that reading the literature required hours spent in the library- navigating chem abstracts, printing citations, locating journals and (finally) reading articles. An easier way to keep up in those days was just to regularly thumb through a handful of relevant journals as the new issues were released. We’ve come a long ways since those days and the internet has certainly changed the way we monitor and read the literature.
These days, the amount of information, both in journal or blog format, is staggering. Luckily for us, literature search engines such as PubMed allow users to save specific searches and receive email updates when new papers are published that satisfy the users query. Well-constructed searches will allow us to stay abreast of recent research without tackling the hopeless task of actually reading all of the journals we probably should be reading.
So we are wondering- does anyone still read entire journal issues on a regular basis, or have we evolved into manuscript-mercenaries, hunting only what we need to survive…
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[poll id=”27″]
@aemonten
wrote on February 16, 2010 at 2:31 pm
I was thinking about this exact thing yesterday morning, while driving to the beach. It makes you wonder about the present relative importance of publishing your paper in the once-considered "wide interest journals", now that everyone interested will read your paper anyway if it makes Pubmed (in addition to clever searches)
Lab Rat
wrote on February 16, 2010 at 4:29 pm
I read the SGM journal because it gets sent to me, and a couple of the ones in the biochem library to help me with my exams. But when I need a specific paper (or a paper about a specific subject) I tend to just google, and not really care which journal it's from.
larry
wrote on February 20, 2010 at 9:57 pm
I flip through about 3-4 paper journals that get sent to me and maybe 1 table of contents that get sent to me on the web. But mainly I find papers by searching. I guess an interesting related question is what search engines people use to find relevant papers. In biomedical science, PubMed had pretty much a monopoly until a couple years ago but Google or Google Scholar seems to be coming on very strong. SciFinder Scholar is important in the chemistry community but I suspect it is less used than PubMed or SciFinder.
Finally, does anybody use PubMedCentral to read papers they find?
Marco
wrote on October 12, 2011 at 9:31 am
Don't you have a sample size? 54% of how many? And who is answering this poll? You could add at least a referrer and an IP localization…
alan@benchfly
wrote on October 12, 2011 at 10:46 am
Being online, these are not scientific polls (ironically…), but are intended to capture the sentiments of our audience, who are largely practicing scientists in the life and physical sciences.