Scientists reading fewer papers for first time in 35 years

A 35-year trend of researchers reading ever more scholarly papers seems to have halted. In 2012, US scientists and social scientists estimated that they read, on average, 22 scholarly articles per month (or 264 per year), fewer than the 27 that they reported in an identical survey last conducted in 2005. It is the first time since the reading-habit questionnaire began in 1977 that manuscript consumption has dropped.

“People have probably hit the limit of the time they have available to read articles,” says information scientist Carol Tenopir, who led the study.

Tenopir, who heads the Center for Information and Communication Studies at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, speculates that a wealth of other information sources is cutting away from the time scholars have to read articles in detail. The survey defines ‘reading’ as going beyond titles or abstracts to the main body of an article, and so it does not reveal whether researchers are quickly skimming over more articles than they did before.

Tenopir’s colleague Donald King began mailing out a reading-habits questionnaire to scholars in 1977. It asked them to recall details of their last scholarly reading, and to estimate the number of scholarly articles they had read in the past month. Researchers said that they got through 12–13 articles per month, and spent an average of 48 minutes on each article. Through the 1980s and 90s, they progressively reported reading more and more articles, but spending less and less time on each.

http://www.nature.com/news/scientists-reading-fewer-papers-for-first-time-in-35-years-1.14658