Economy of Attention

[Phil Davis <pmd8@cornell.edu>]

Joe gets it right (yet again) with his discussion of attention. 
It is a scarce resource and something publishers fiercely compete 
for.  As readers, we are loath to waste some of this precious 
resource on locating and evaluating what we should devote our 
attention.  We are all cognitive misers and use simple heuristics 
to make our decisions: the prestige of the journal, its impact 
factor, the reputation of the author, a referral.

An excellent short summary of Georg Frank's Economy of Attention 
is freely available from Science

Franck, G. (1999). Scientific Communication--A Vanity Fair? 
Science, 286(5437), 53-55. 
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/286/5437/53

--Phil Davis