Computer Assisted.

I have frequently pondered just how much easier scholarly research has become with the rise of the internet, digital databases, and search engines. In particular, if I want to find out what has already been written on almost any given topic, I can now do a fairly complete search in a only few minutes. Such a search would take many hours of dull library work before the present age of the internet.

More recently I thought: If ``library'' research is now essentially instantaneous, has there been a corresponding increase in academic output? Are more papers being published per year per scholar? Are better papers being produced?

And then it hit me: Why don't I check the web! Indeed, a Google search on ``internet scholarly output'' produced the following hit:

Bibliometric analysis of the impact of internet use on scholarly productivity, Noam Kaminer, Yale M. Braunstein, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Volume 49 Issue 8, Pages 720 - 730. Published Online: 7 Dec 1998.

I immediately felt so productive, and efficient, that I called it a day and went to sleep.