Innovative Research in Academic Libraries: Do Editorials, Agendas, or Think Tanks Make a Difference?

摘要

Do practitioners and scholars of a profession still pause for a few moments and scan the editorials at the fronts of journals? In the digital environment, anecdotal evidence suggests that most readers come to a journal through a specific indexing tool or search term that links to an individual article; or, if a reader is looking at a table of contents for the latest issue of a journal, he or she scans all the titles but probably only looks at one or two articles that have specific resonance. It is rare that a reader goes systematically through the journal contents from front to back, as was common with printed journals even if it was done hurriedly. It has never been a given that people would peruse editorials; the value of such opinion pieces is too unpredictable. That opening essay might be a summary of the current themes, or an opinionated harangue, or a bland rumination on a topic unrelated to the rest of the journal articles. Only once in a while might it be a fresh report conveying new information. The "personal opinion" function that editorials used to fulfill, allowing an editor to convey the tone of a journal and lead the direction of its content, is being taken over by personal and disciplinary blogs that are a vehicle almost entirely devoted to this type of individual writing. The concept that a journal might incorporate several different sections of formal and informal writing is gradually giving way to a more granular approach to the professional literature. We are more likely to turn to different brands of digital media depending on what we want-if, for example, we want opinion, or formal empirical research, or simple practical examples, or field-defining syntheses.