«I JUST READ EVERYTHING»

Furthermore, the point needs to be made that not every published article or book makes a significant contribution to the scholarly enterprise. In a paper delivered at the 1989 MLA convention and later published in the ADE Bulletin, Richard Marius, director of the Expository Writing Program at Harvard University, referred to a study of academic writing which concluded that eighty percent of the articles published in academic journals were never cited by anybody (5). An article in Newsweek in January of 1991 mentioned a study conducted by the Institute for Scientific Information, which made a count of how often articles published in the top 4,500 science journals were cited in later published articles; the study discovered that forty-five percent of those articles did not get a single citation in the five years after they were originally published (Begley 44). These statistics do not justify our deducing that these uncited articles were not worth the paper they were printed on, but they do make the point that a shocking number of published papers make little or no impact even on the scholarly community to which they are addressed. Some wag is bound to turn the familiar academic phrase "publish or perish" into "publish and perish."

-JACweb.org