E‐mail decay rates among corresponding authors in MEDLINE

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Abstract
One of the early features of ARPANET, the predecessor to the modern‐day Internet, was the ability to communicate via electronic mail (e‐mail) with other users; the first e‐mail was reportedly sent in 1971 (Hardy, 1996). E‐mail quickly gained popularity among computer scientists, but spread more slowly through the biomedical research community. The first article in MEDLINE to mention ‘electronic mail’ appeared in 1983 (Cross, 1983). After another decade—about the same time that graphical methods of Internet navigation, namely web browsers, became popular—many MEDLINE‐listed journals began to include electronic contact information in articles, which led to a rapid growth in the number of publications with corresponding author e‐mail addresses (CAEs; Fig 1). Figure 1. Number of e‐mail addresses published in MEDLINE per year compared with the number of articles per year (solid line). Also shown is the number of unique e‐mail addresses published (dashed line), which is growing more slowly than the total number (dotted line). The potential benefits of e‐mail as a means of correspondence in biomedical research was noted even before the start of this trend (Pallen, 1995). Now, e‐mail is not only commonplace in biomedical research, it is the norm: authors, collaborators, readers, editors and reviewers for scientific manuscripts all rely on e‐mail. We generally do not think about how much it has transformed the way we communicate with our colleagues until our e‐mail servers are down. Although its ubiquitous nature renders e‐mail a ‘transparent technology’, it is hard to ignore the advantages it holds over previously dominant means of scientific correspondence: postal and voice communications. The difference in cost and effort between sending one and many e‐mails is minimal, unlike other media. E‐mail communication may be slower than voice, but it is virtually free—assuming computer equipment and Internet connections are in place—even across great geographical distances. E‐mail also …
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