Online accessibility of academic articles and the diversity of economics

Timo Boppart and Kevin Staub

No 75, ECON - Working Papers from Department of Economics - University of Zurich

Abstract: A key aspect of generating new ideas is drawing from different elements of preexisting knowledge and combining them into a new idea. In such a process, the diversity of ideas plays a central role. This paper examines the empirical question of how the internet affected the diversity of new research by making the existing literature accessible online. The internet marks a technological shock which affects how academic scientists search for and browse through published documents. Using article-level data from economics journals for the period 1991 to 2009, we document how online accessibility lead academic economists to draw from a more diverse set of literature, and to write articles which incorporated more diverse contents.

Keywords: Digitization; online publication; bibliometrics; knowledge production function; recombinant growth; citations; networks; scholarly communication (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A11 D83 O31 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-hpe, nep-ict and nep-sog
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Working Paper: Online accessibility of academic articles and the diversity of economics (2012)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zur:econwp:075

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