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Title    The Mostly Unread World of Academic Papers
Date    Wednesday March 19 2014, @03:57PM
Author    janrinok
Topic   
from the a-little-light-reading dept.
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/03/19/1417217

AnonTechie writes:

"In an article called Killing Pigs and Weed Maps: The Mostly Unread World of Academic Papers it is claimed that, according to one study, which was presumably read by more than three people, half of all academic papers are read by no more than three people. A burgeoning field of academic study called citation analysis (it's exactly what it sounds like) has found that this joke holds true for not just dissertations, but many academic papers. A study at the University of Indiana found that 'as many as 50% of papers are never read by anyone other than their authors, referees and journal editors.' That same study concluded that 'some 90% of papers that have been published in academic journals are never cited.' That is, nine out of 10 academic papers-which both often take years to research, compile, submit, and get published, and are a major component by which a scholar's output is measured-contribute little to the academic conversation.

This is hardly surprising given the topics that some have chosen to research and present as papers. For example:

  1. Complexity of Early and Middle Successional Stages in a Rocky Intertidal Surfgrass Community.
  2. How Good Is Your Weed Map? A Comparison of Spatial Interpolators.
  3. Killing a Pig."

Links

  1. "AnonTechie" - http://soylentnews.org/~anontechie
  2. " Killing Pigs and Weed Maps: The Mostly Unread World of Academic Papers " - http://www.psmag.com/navigation/books-and-culture/killing-pigs-weed-maps-mostly-unread-world-academic-papers-76733/

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printed from SoylentNews, The Mostly Unread World of Academic Papers on 2024-04-25 04:05:57