Just as the aim of channel surfing is not to find a program to watch, the goal of literature surfing, is not to find an article to read, but rather to find, assess, and exploit a range of information by scanning portions of many articles. This behavior is common among scientists (9). Longitudinal studies of e-journal use confirm that scientists are indeed “reading” more papers at a faster pace (10) [...] These changes in journal use are far greater in STM disciplines than the averages over all disciplines, suggesting that as work with the literature has moved online, scientists are scanning more and reading less. [...] More recent studies of the research process have emphasized the varied ways in which scientists work with information (13, 14). The literature is scanned not only to position new findings in cognate fields and learn about collaborators’ domains, but also to monitor the progress of peers and competitors. Information is collated to compare measurement and instrumentation details; it is also used to compile personal collections in evolving areas of interest and to extract the facts and evidence needed to build databases. These are all aspects of strategic reading, a robust, well-entrenched behavior that is vastly more efficient in the digital realm and is thus a promising target for digital support.

Scientists may have moved well beyond traditional reading, but they still remain engaged with the narrative of scientific articles and need tools to help them read, and not only mine, that narrative. [...] Reading the sentences of an article in relevance order rather than narrative order is an example of strategic reading within an article.An example of strategic reading across a collection is provided by Information Hyperlinked over Proteins (iHOP),which uses genes and proteins to create a network of sentences and abstracts for searching and navigating MEDLINE abstracts (32).

Scientists have always read strategically, working with many articles simultaneously to search, filter, compare, arrange, link, annotate, and analyze fragments of content.Now, however, two important trends are interacting to support and intensify the effectiveness of these practices. The first is the wide-scale use by scientists of digital indexing, retrieval, and navigation re- sources (such as PubMed, Web of Science, the ACMDigital Library, NASA’s Astrophysics Data System, CiteSeer, Scopus, and Google Scholar) to exploit large quantities of relevant information without reading individual articles. The second is the emergence within many scientific disciplines of ontologies for representing and linking scientific data. [...] The driving force for change remains the same: the growing quantity and complexity of information in combination with limited time for reading. But in some disciplines, we seem to be past the point where any further specialization of research focus or elaboration of collaborative relationships are effective (4, 5). [...] Scientists have always strived to avoid unnecessary reading.Like all researchers, they use indexing and citations as indicators of relevance, abstracts and literature reviews as surrogates for full papers, and social networks of colleagues and graduate students as personal alerting services. The aim is to move rapidly through the literature to assess and exploit content with as little actual reading as possible.