But it is inappropriate to embrace the notion that scientists are being swamped by--indeed, that they are threatened with drowning in--an ever-mounting flood of scientific journals.
I've been trying for years to lay this baseless mythology to rest, because it can foster in a conscientious researcher the debilitating feeling that he or she can't possibly keep up with what's current in a given discipline. Nevertheless, the mythology persists--despite the fact that examination of scientific journal publishing patterns and citation data should serve to debunk it.
The first project I participated in as a young information researcher at Johns Hopkins University involved a survey of medical journals. At that time, 1951, there already were thousands of biomedical serial titles. Not every serial is a journal, and some are classified as books that appear in a regular or irregular series. Countless periodicals remain "extant" as far as libraries are concerned, but most ...
