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Juan Fiero writes:

CBS News Reports: [cbslocal.com]

A growing number of scientific studies is making it harder for researchers to keep track of all their content.

Attention decay in science [link [arxiv.org] to paper], a new paper published by professors from universities in Finland and California, reports that "the attention that can be devoted to individual papers measured by their citation counts, is bound to decay rapidly," due to the overwhelming number of studies.

The research suggests that the decay is accelerating in recent times, signaling that papers are forgotten more quickly. The study focused on scientific research but notes that the same concept can be applied to the internet and popular culture.

The conclusion states that due to the exponential growth of these publications scholars “forget” papers more easily now than in the past, sometimes making it harder to isolate the most relevant information.

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