Reviewing the Growth and Development of Scholarly, Online Publishing: Forging a New Frontier in Public Relations Research

This article reviews the prestige, strengths and limitations of online journals, the role they play and the impact they have in a variety of academic disciplines. It suggests electronic publication has become popular not only because it permits scholars and academic libraries to avoid the perils of greatly increasing subscription charges by traditional printed journals but also because online journal articles are available anywhere and anytime beyond the physical space of libraries. While exploring the growth and development of online scholarly publication, the article finds some academic fields appear to value online presentation more than others and the impact and perceived value of electronic publication frequently is based on a variety of factors. The most prestigious online journals have open access to everyone; select their content through a double-blind, peer-review process; have esteemed authors and editorial boards; are sponsored by highly regarded societies; score high on the appropriate article citation indexes; and are favorably regarded in terms of a variety of subjective rankings by groups of scholars. It also reports that professors in a wide variety of academic disciplines believe online presentation and publication eventually will become the main format for scholarly research and reports on recent research indicating online journals are more widely read and cited than printed ones