Does the Internet Change the Competition of Scholarly Communities? - Evidence from a Citation Analysis

Recent research on search costs in electronic markets documents that the wide use of Internet has reduced consumer search costs and has increased market efficiency. This study, considering scholarly publications as a special type of product, investigates the Internet’s impact on knowledge usage and transfer in academic communities. Based on the work on search theory and knowledge transfer, this paper proposes that lower search costs of scientific publications can increase scholars’ knowledge usage and change their capability or means to compete in the scientific marketplace for audiences. Scholarly articles not freely available online may be quoted less because of the easy and free access to a growing number of substitutable publications. Analysis of randomly selected publications from the ACM digital library provides preliminary support for my propositions. In addition, results also suggest that the Internet has a major impact on the speed of knowledge transfer among scholars.