Short versus long articles

Jakob Nielsen has an interesting little article on his Alertbox site, which discusses the advantages and disadvantages of short and long articles from a cost-benefit perspective.

Of course, a scholarly journal cannot avoid having long articles and readers come to the site expecting to find them. However, the abstracts are a summary of what is in the paper and my guess is that people read the abstract to decide whether or not the paper is for them - in effect, the abstract is the short article that leads to the long one. So I hope we are getting it right!