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Scientific Study Finds There Are Too Many Scientific Studies
HughPickens.com writes: Chris Matyszczyk reports at Cnet that a new scientific study concludes there are too many scientific studies — scientists simply can't keep track of all the studies in their field. The paper, titled "Attention Decay in Science," looked at all publications (articles and reviews) written in English till the end of 2010 within the database of the Thomson Reuters (TR) Web of Science. For each publication they extracted its year of publication, the subject category of the journal in which it is published and the corresponding citations to that publication. The 'decay' the researchers investigated is how quickly a piece of research is discarded measured by establishing the initial publication, the peak in its popularity and, ultimately, its disappearance from citations in subsequent publications.
"Nowadays papers are forgotten more quickly. Attention, measured by the number and lifetime of citations, is the main currency of the scientific community, and along with other forms of recognition forms the basis for promotions and the reputation of scientists," says the study. "Typically, the citation rate of a paper increases up to a few years after its publication, reaches a peak and then decreases rapidly. This decay can be described by an exponential or a power law behavior, as in ultradiffusive processes, with exponential fitting better than power law for the majority of cases (PDF). The decay is also becoming faster over the years, signaling that nowadays papers are forgotten more quickly." Matyszczyk says,"If publication has become too easy, there will be more and more of it."
"Nowadays papers are forgotten more quickly. Attention, measured by the number and lifetime of citations, is the main currency of the scientific community, and along with other forms of recognition forms the basis for promotions and the reputation of scientists," says the study. "Typically, the citation rate of a paper increases up to a few years after its publication, reaches a peak and then decreases rapidly. This decay can be described by an exponential or a power law behavior, as in ultradiffusive processes, with exponential fitting better than power law for the majority of cases (PDF). The decay is also becoming faster over the years, signaling that nowadays papers are forgotten more quickly." Matyszczyk says,"If publication has become too easy, there will be more and more of it."
As Slashdot patrons are eager to point out every time this sort of story gets published, the phenomenon described is not necessarily a bad thing.
Many physical chemists these days are investigating ways to build nanostructures that can demonstrate interesting phenomena. For example, chemists have known for a long time that certain molecules will scatter light in the visible range but decrease its frequency by a molecule-specific constant. This process is called Raman scattering. These molecules are often dissolved in water, and it was recently shown that the adding metal nanoparticles to the solution will dramatically increase the amount of observed Raman scattering. Suddenly there's a lot of new research to do: How does the increase depend on the nanoparticles' sizes? On their shapes? On the particular metal of which they're made? On whether their surfaces are smooth or rough? What if the nanoparticles are hollow, or composed of layers of different materials? What are the theoretical explanations for the observed behaviors? And do any phenomena *other* than Raman scattering benefit from the presence of these nanoparticles?
Many papers have been (and are still being!) published on all the clever things people have tried with these nanoparticles. Ten years from now, we'll have a pretty understanding of all the properties of surface-enhanced Raman scattering and most of these papers will be "forgotten" as researchers consolidate their knowledge into a couple of good textbooks. But that's perfectly fine---in fact, that's the whole point of scientific progress. Science is the process of observing a lot of complicated stuff and finding the most compact explanations for everything that was observed. It's nice that eighty years ago one researcher could sometimes discover a new phenomenon and provide a complete explanation for it before publishing his knowledge to the world. Today we have more researchers exploring a larger space of possible experiments, and the things they're studying are much more complicated. So they publish more papers as "scratch work" to help other researchers who are investigating the same phenomena, and eventually these papers are replaced by books. Again, that's perfectly fine.