《新编考研英语阅读理解150篇》Unite_5_Text_3.doc

.word可编辑. . 专业.专注 . 《新编考研英语阅读理解150篇》Unite 6 Text 2　　Online databases of scientific journals have made life easier for scientists.? No more strolling down to the library, searching through the old stacks and queuing up for the photocopier. Instead, a few clicks of a mouse can bring forth the desired papers and maybe others that the reader did not know of-the "long tail" of information that the web makes available.　　Well, that is how it is supposed to work, but does it? James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, decided to investigate.? Dr Evans based his analysis on data from citation indexes compiled by Thomson Scientific.? They record how often one article is cited as a source by others, and thus measure a　　paper's influence. Those used by Dr Evans cover 6,000 of the most prominent academic journals.? By cross-referring these to a database called Fulltext Sources Online, he was able to work out when each of these journals became available on the web-and whether a journal had posted back-issues electronically as well.? For each research paper he looked at, he calculated the average age of the articles citecL? He then calculated,? for each of those cited articles,? the number of back-issues of the journal it had been published in which were available on the web at the time when it was cited, and averaged that too.? Finally, he　　looked for correlations between the two averages.　　What he discovered was that, for every additional year of back-issues of a journal available online,the average age of the articles cited from that journal fell by a month? He also found a fall, once a journal was online, in the number of papers in it that got any citations at all.? Rather than measuring the length of the tail, then, it seems that modern science is actually focusing on a tiny bit of it.　　Why this should be so remains unclear. It does not seem to have anything to do with economics. The same effect applied whether or not a journal had to