THE FUTURE OF RESEARCH COMMUNICATION

Abstract

One of the looming questions for researchers is — how will we be communicating about our research by the end of the century? Forecasting is always a dangerous activity. The rule‐of‐thumb is either to cover a very short period (in which case you can hardly go wrong), or a very long period (in which case everybody will have forgotten the predictions long before their sell‐by date). A period extending into the early years of the next century seems to fall unhappily between these two preferred targets but it actually has one advantage, as I discovered some years ago. At the end of the 1970s I wrote a brief study of how information technology might affect the communication of research during the 1980s. One of the rationales for covering a decade was that typically it takes 5–10 years for a major new development to move from being a minority concern to engaging the interest of a large fraction of the relevant audience. (Television, for example, required some ten years to take off properly in both the USA and the UK.) So a ten‐year span should make it possible to spot some of the winners, though not necessarily how they will be used.

Citation

Meadows, J. (1994), "THE FUTURE OF RESEARCH COMMUNICATION", Online and CD-Rom Review, Vol. 18 No. 5, pp. 301-303. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb024504