Increase in number of scientific articles decreases visibility of individual articles
In collaboration with their American colleagues, computational science researchers from Aalto University have published a study that utilises extensive electronic databases to examine the visibility of scientific articles among scholars.
'Scientific publications can be studied via citation and co-citation analyses, which we also utilised in our own research on the decrease in visibility of scientific content. We found that article visibility decreases according to exponentials, and that the decay is getting faster and faster in recent times' explains Professor Santo Fortunato.
'Most importantly, we noticed that if time is measured in terms of how many papers are produced, the decay in attention is approximately constant. So the phenomenon is not due to a shortening of the attention span of scientists, but by the deluge of published items."
The research material consisted of articles and reviews written in English that were in the Thomson Reuters (TR) Web of Science up until 2010. The researchers classified the publications into four categories: clinical medicine, molecular biology, chemistry and physics. These fields contain the greatest number of publications. The research focused on so-called Top 10% publications, which has the greatest number of citations.
For more information:
Santo Fortunato
Professor of Complex Systems
[email protected]
Department of Biomedical Engineering
and Computational Science
Aalto University
Link to the article on arXiv.org
Read more news

Renovation of the service desk is starting in Harald Herlin Learning Centre
The service desk is going under renovation starting from 27 June. We apologize for the noise.
A record number of new doctorates at the 2022 Ceremonial Conferment of Doctoral Degrees in Technology
The most prestigious of academic celebrations was held on the Otaniemi campus on 17 June. The previous conferment ceremony took place in 2019, and the annual tradition has had to be postponed two years in a row. As a result, this year's celebrations at Dipoli were grander than ever before.
Nearly 18 million euros for research
The Academy of Finland funding brings six new Academy Research Fellows, 14 Postdoctoral Researchers and 23 Academy Projects to Aalto University