Academics have always based reading decisions on recommendations from colleagues. This trend has accelerated since email and the web were invented, as your coll

Academics have always based reading decisions on recommendations from colleagues. This trend has accelerated since email and the web were invented, as your colleagues can communicate with you through more channels, and more recommendations go back and forth. Social review always has been a big part of research discovery, and it's become more important with the advent of the web. Search engines play a huge role in driving research discovery, and their ranking systems are fundamentally based on crowd review - calculations using links, as in the case of Google and Bing, or citations, as in the case of Google Scholar. One might wonder in theory whether a search engine could do a good job of ranking academic papers, or whether recommendations from one's colleagues is a viable way of discovering papers. But when you look, in practice, into how academics operate day to day, those channels are the ones that academics increasingly use to discover research.