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I have no real point here, only historical commentary. I've been reading papers from the 1960s, which is when the term "information explosion" was coined. Peop
by dalke 11y ago
I have no real point here, only historical commentary.
I've been reading papers from the 1960s, which is when the term "information explosion" was coined. People then were struggling to stay current with the literature, and thought 'things were seriously getting out of hand.'
This was the start of abstracting services, like ISI, where you could even arrange the results of a keyword search of all the new papers to be sent to you each week - a clear predecessor to personalized RSS feeds.
Going back even further to the immediate post-war era, the library systems of the time, which were structured around books and journals and organized by topic, couldn't keep up with the deluge of research reports which cut across multiple topics. The field of information retrieval, using first punched cards and then computers, started because the publication flow was 'seriously getting out of hand'.
Or for a specific example, after high T_c superconductors were discovered in 1986, there was a mad rush of interest as solid state physicists from around the world explored the new territory. A Google Scholar search for "high temperature superconductor" finds:
1986 - 846 publications
1987 - 2 600
1988 - 3 900
1989 - 4 780
1990 - 4 870
1991 - 5 250
That's 14 papers per day, any one of which might be "very related to your research, or scoop your latest idea, or have good ideas you can use in your own work."
Granted, 14 << 50, but that doesn't include some of the papers about "high Tc" which don't use the whole phrase. Also, those are 14 peer-reviewed papers per day, so there has been some filter, and experimental research in high Tc research requires more equipment than deep learning.
Think of my comment as a reminder that things have been out of hand for most of a century, and dealing with that deluge emotionally connects you to the headache that generations of researchers before you have had to suffer with. :)