RE: Does More Mean More?

["Emma Veitch" <eveitch@plos.org>]

Agree with Steve. Particularly in the field of health sciences, 
researchers who are doing systematic reviews or meta-analyses of 
the literature would want access to *all* available information, 
not just the subset that particular journals have filtered out 
for them. The resercher's own filtering criteria can be specified 
in the queries they put to PubMed or other databases. The 
challenge is in making indexing of the literature sufficiently 
sophisticated so it can support the sorts of queries that users 
will want to run.

Best, Emma

Emma Veitch, PhD
Publications Manager, PLoS Clinical Trials
Public Library of Science
7 Portugal Place, Cambridge, CB5 8AF, UK
eveitch@plos.org
01223 463 343

> -----Original Message-----
> [mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Steve
> Hitchcock
> Sent: 07 February 2006 03:05
> To: Liblicense
> Subject: Re: Does More Mean More?
>
> The idea that "readers want the journal to do the filtering for 
> them" is really quite quaint, it seems to me. Perhaps not 
> surprisingly, as Sally mentions the term 'paper'. We need to be 
> careful about terminology here. In the electronic environment 
> journals do *peer review* rather than filter. If you want to 
> see what electronic filters are, see e.g. Citeseer, Google 
> Scholar. In these services peer review and associated journal 
> titles are labels (tags), more or less important depending on 
> the user, that go into the filter mix.
>
> The changing role of journals in the overall scheme of 
> filtering and selection is a fascinating and critical point of 
> enquiry, but the old points of reference in this discussion are 
> completely inadequate.
>
> Steve Hitchcock
> IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science
> University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK
> Email: sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk
> Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 3256    Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865