Aug 25th, 2008 |
Bob Parkins, Canadian Government Executive MagazinePossible implications of Search Engines in research?
So it turns out that search engines may not be all they’re cracked up to be – with possibly huge implications for government, of all places.
NextGov, a newish online newsletter on technology and government, cites research by James Evans of the University of Chicago, who studied a database of 34 million science articles. Evans found that, as more articles came online, they were less likely to be cited in research – and those that were cited tended to be more recent.
“Searching online is more efficient,” Evans wrote, “and hyperlinks quickly put researchers in touch with prevailing opinion, but they may also accelerate consensus and narrow the range of findings and ideas grappled with by scholars.”
NextGov also noted Evans’s suggestion – however counterintuitive – that poor indexing actually makes print library research more valuable. “Poor indexing—indexing by titles and authors, primarily within journals—likely had the unintended consequence of actually helping the integration of science and scholarship,” Evans wrote. “By drawing researchers into a wider array of articles, print browsing and perusal may have facilitated broader comparisons and scholarship.”
NextGov then gets to the point for the public sector:
“It doesn’t take much to see the implications for government analysts of any type – intelligence and law enforcement agents, environmentalists, economists, health researchers and, of course, scientists — who use Internet search engines as well as proprietary ones linked into government databases, such as Justice Department case files. Highly relevant and specific search results narrow findings and can possibly prohibit the eurekas that come from a broader search, which can link what is seemingly unrelated material that provides real insight. Or does the Internet’s benefits outweigh those costs?”
A good question, deserving of an answer.
(Evans’s notes, on his blog, were actually in response to Nick Carr’s now famous [or infamous] article “Is Google Making Us Stupid” in The Atlantic. Carr argued that the Internet has rewired our brains so that it diminishes our ability to be reflective and to be more interpretive).
