In today's 'Guardian'

Web journals 'narrowing study' by Linda Nordling:

Online publishing has sparked an explosion in the number of places where academics can showcase their work. Today, no field of study is too obscure to have its own dedicated title. But have platforms such as the Journal of Happiness Studies or Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy News made academic publishing more democratic?

Far from it, says Alex Bentley, an anthropologist at Durham University. "We're just producing so much wordage that nobody has time to read anything. It makes academic publishing, and even science itself, a bit like trying to get hits on blogs or try to make yourself the Britney of science."

Although the internet puts information at our fingertips, we have no time to trawl it. As a result, we trust sites like Digg.com to guide us through the information jungle. This phenomenon is called "herding" by economists, who use it to explain, say, fashion trends and stockmarket bubbles.

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SEO can, however, make articles tedious to read. A headline that once read "Of mice and men" for a study that discussed the suitability of mice when testing drugs for humans might now say "Suitability of mice for in vivo drug testing" or something even more jargon-laden.

But those who fear an end to eloquence in research articles should stop worrying, says Bora Zivkovic, community manager at open access publisher PLoS One and author of the blog Around the Clock (http://scienceblogs.com/clock). According to him, today's dull SEO writing is a passing phase. The open access movement will tear down the walls between academic publishing and the rest of the internet, making eye-catching titles not only optional but downright necessary.

Better searching

"Titles that go 'the effect of x and y is z' are perfect for machines right now, but the machines are getting better and advances in technology will mean that search engines are going to find the important keywords in the text," he says. But catchy titles and readable writing will be necessary to draw in lay people, journalists and bloggers, who will have a much bigger role in determining what research is read. "Google loves blogs, so if your work is being blogged about, it will generate interest in your paper."

"Google Scholar initially wasn't very good, but now it is," he adds. "It covers more of the literature than Web of Science [another, older academic search engine]." However, the big difference about Google Scholar is that you don't have to be a rocket scientist to use it, he says. It is intuitive and will lead you to a free version of an article if one exists.

As search engines get more sophisticated, the technology will hopefully result in better ways of measuring research quality, says Bentley. "Citations have always been important. But they have never been as ridiculously important as they are now," he says. "I think that people are recognising this and that we will see more evaluation mechanisms that are based on actually reading the articles."