The prevalence of additional electronic features in pure E-journals

Electronic journals are offered in many forms, some available in both print and electronic form, and some in electronic form alone. Purely electronic journals have had the opportunity to develop new features and formats that take advantage of the online environment. This paper uses a genre-based analysis to look at online journals in two fields, physics and psychology, focusing on whether purely electronic journals do in fact feature elements and formats that would be impossible to present in print form, and the prevalence of such features across the fields. Journals were examined for the use of non-linearity, interactivity, multimedia, multiple use, and rapid publication. The results of the study indicate that additional features are only selectively used in electronic journals, and suggest that few incentives exist for authors and publishers to utilize additional features more, as conventionally structured articles fulfill the needs of the scholarly journal article genre.