A recent study examined recent studies and concluded there have been way too many studies recently.
The paper, Attention Decay in Science, says the sheer volume of studies available to scholars is making it difficult to absorb the information that's truly important.
The study's co-authors, a team of researchers from Helsinki's Aalto University School of Science and the labs of technology giants Bosch and Hewlett-Packard, state:
"The exponential growth in the number of scientific papers makes it increasingly difficult for researchers to keep track of all the publications relevant to their work. Consequently, the attention that can be devoted to individual papers, measured by their citation counts, is bound to decay rapidly."
Basically: there are way more studies getting published than there used to be, making it difficult to keep tabs on everything that's out there. Therefore, each individual study gets lost in the shuffle and quickly gets forgotten. Presumably, scientists will be on the brink of a breakthrough but then get sidetracked by a study exploring, say, the connection between watching porn and world-class weightlifting.
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Researchers say that as more studies are released, older research is consistently pushed aside, with readership, academic citations and overall influence going down rapidly in the years following its publication - regardless of how profound or groundbreaking the research may be. This trend was observed to be relatively consistent across most fields of academic study. Researchers acknowledge that there might simply be too much information to process:
"The decay is getting faster and faster, indicating that scholars “forget” more easily papers now than in the past. We found that this has to do with the exponential growth in the number of publications, which inevitably accelerates the turnover of papers, due to the finite capacity of scholars to keep track of the scientific literature."
The study concludes that the over-saturation of studies could account for why modern humans basically have the attention span of a goldfish.
Clearly, another study could be needed.
You can read the study on too many studies here.
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