Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/77555 
Year of Publication: 
2012
Series/Report no.: 
Working Paper No. 75
Publisher: 
University of Zurich, Department of Economics, Zurich
Abstract: 
A key aspect of generating new ideas is drawing from different elements of past knowledge and combining them into a new idea. In such a process, the diversity of ideas plays a central role. This paper examines the empirical question of how the internet affected the diversity of new research by making the existing literature accessible online. The internet marks a technological shock which affects how academic scientist search for and browse through published documents. Using article-level data from economics journals for the period 1991 to 2009, we document how online accessibility lead academic economists to draw from a more diverse set of literature for their articles, and to write articles which incorporated more diverse contents.
Subjects: 
digitization
online publication
bibliometrics
knowledge production function
recombinant growth
citations
networks
scholarly communication
JEL: 
A11
D83
O31
O33
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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