Do We Really Need More Controversial Ideas
Dept. of Unsettling Thoughts
More than 30,000 academic journals publish in excess of two-million papers every year, which works out to something like 5,000 per day or about 200 per hour. That’s a lot; too many, some have argued. It’s not true that most of those papers go un-cited (Nature put the lie to that myth a few years back) but most attract modest readerships because they’re hidden behind high-priced paywalls, or they’re comprehensible to only a select few, or they’re somewhat dull. In some cases, all of the above.