[HN Gopher] Looking for Hidden Gems in Scientific Literature
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       Looking for Hidden Gems in Scientific Literature
        
       Author : ravenical
       Score  : 31 points
       Date   : 2025-11-12 19:14 UTC (6 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (elicit.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (elicit.com)
        
       | NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
       | >There are on the order of 100 million papers [reference 2]
       | published to date.
       | 
       | Does anyone else feel as if this (admittedly rough) estimate is
       | off by an order of magnitude?
        
         | cnees wrote:
         | OpenAlex has 240M. https://docs.openalex.org/api-entities/works
         | 
         | CORE has 431M. https://core.ac.uk/data
         | 
         | Crossref has 165M. https://www.crossref.org/blog/2025-public-
         | data-file-now-avai...
         | 
         | These datasets are all biased towards work published in the
         | digital age, but it's important to note that work is coming out
         | much faster now than it used to.
        
           | ktallett wrote:
           | Is that because there is a pressure to publish? As I wouldn't
           | say we make advancements at a rate any different during the
           | last two decades than we have over the 20 years prior to
           | that.
        
         | rdlw wrote:
         | If 1% of the last 10 billion people to live were academics and
         | published on average 5 papers (many only had one, i.e. their
         | dissertation/thesis, but a small fraction will have had dozens
         | or hundreds), that comes to 500 million.
         | 
         | I'm curious, do you think it's an order of magnitude too low or
         | too high?
        
           | NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
           | I think it's too low.
        
       | pjdesno wrote:
       | Note that Claude Shannon's MS thesis was about re-discovering the
       | work of an obscure British analytic philosopher, whose work from
       | about 100 years earlier had been almost completely forgotten.
       | (perhaps a few philosophers and mathematicians remembered Boole,
       | but they certainly didn't teach his work to the engineers who had
       | to design relay-based logic circuits back in the pre-transistor
       | days)
        
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