In light of these new capabilities and cognitive theory, one must consider a new format. Perhaps the next sentence says all we need to know. It is important to reconsider the presentation of medical research communications based upon both cognitive psychology theory and the capabilities of the Internet. Both offer the possibility of optimizing and speeding up the process of evolution based in part on what we know about human learning and memory. The current approaches to the Internet have been elementary.
Many journals now provide the text of abstracts and table of contents for their issues.
A few have begun to offer full text to articles. Examining articles on the net is similar to having the journal in front of you except one reads from a monitor, not a paper page. This is a major advance in terms of helping people from across the world to access the Internet. However, it is not a major conceptual advance, as the way one learns from the two dimensional serial paper journal is the same way one learns from the two dimensional, serial electronic publication. There is a slight improvement in speed to access and retrieval.