CHAPTER 4 - Postpublication Processing of Scientific Information

Abstract

This chapter discusses postpublication processing of scientific information. Between the time an article is published and the time it is cited in another article, a great deal of digesting, interpreting, and evaluating of its content takes plac,e which serves to integrate the new information in that article into the existing body of scientific information. This is all a part of the continuous filtering and integrating that synthesizes scientific information into knowledge. As a process, it is pervasive in science. While it is presumed to be especially interactive with and to some extent evolving from activities on the research front, the process becomes formal some time after publication when citations of the work begin to cluster with citations of related work. Subsequently, these clusters begin abstractly to take on identities of their own, displacing the individuality of the separate items. Clusters of cited articles may be replaced by an integrative review that cites them or by another article that presents new work in a different perspective so that several individual pieces of work become organized under a single integrative concept.