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This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science, I’m Cynthia Graber. This will just take a minute.

Not too long ago, scientists had to hoof¹ it to the library to review the literature. And they had to flip² through a card catalog to find that dusty old volume with the article they wanted. Not so today—the internet’s made things a lot easier. But maybe it’s a bit too easy. That’s what one sociologist³ writes in the latest issue of Science. He analyzed⁴ a database of 34 million scholarly articles and their citations⁵, spanning six decades of research. The conclusion? He says articles from the online age actually cite fewer studies, from a shrinking pool of journals. And the same popular studies are mentioned over and over. It’s a bit counterintuitive, considering the internet’s made more articles available than ever before. So what’s going on? First, internet searches are really precise. Scientists might miss tangential⁶ stuff they would have encountered browsing⁷ through a print journal. And the author says the internet leads scientists to the most popular, talked-about research—which could overshadow the lone⁸ dissenter⁹. But perhaps the joy that scientists find in arguing with each other can be counted on to keep the enterprise from turning into an echo chamber¹⁰.

Thanks for the minute for Scientific American’s 60-Second Science, I’m Cynthia Graber.