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Economy of Attention



Joe gets it right (yet again) with his discussion of attention. It is a scarce resource and something publishers fiercely compete for. As readers, we are loath to waste some of this precious resource on locating and evaluating what we should devote our attention. We are all cognitive misers and use simple heuristics to make our decisions: the prestige of the journal, its impact factor, the reputation of the author, a referral.

An excellent short summary of Georg Frank's Economy of Attention is freely available from Science

Franck, G. (1999). Scientific Communication--A Vanity Fair? Science, 286(5437), 53-55. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/286/5437/53

--Phil Davis