The paradox of our Golden Age of science: more research is being published by more scientists than ever, but the result is actually slowing progress! With too much to read & absorb, papers in more crowded fields are citing new work less, and canonizing highly-cited articles more. 
Based on 90M papers: “These findings suggest troubling implications…. If too many papers are published in short order, new ideas cannot be carefully considered against old, and processes of cumulative advantage cannot work to select valuable innovations.” doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2…
See also this 👇 thread on the burden of knowledge in science.
https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1417708513573408769
I think this is something we have to grapple with. As someone who reads & tweets out a lot of scientific articles, I am shocked about how much good, potentially important and potentially disruptive work is basically uncited & ignored, or else never built on. But how to solve it?
And the tools we use to manage this flood introduce their own problems: This study shows how how arbitrary factors (like hyphens in a paper title) can distort the progress of science, as academic search tools had issues with hyphenated titles, dropping their visibility & cites.
The winner in this world of too many scientific articles? Writers of reviews.
This work shows the they help legitimate and consolidate fields of knowledge.... and they also steal citations from other papers. Cites to references in reviews drop, as people cite the review instead!
This work shows the they help legitimate and consolidate fields of knowledge.... and they also steal citations from other papers. Cites to references in reviews drop, as people cite the review instead!
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