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 Fifty Years Sep 25, 2023 12 2 Share Tomás Saraceno's sculpture Algo-r(h)i(y)thms The world is drowning in scientific research. Over 2 million scientific papers are published each year. That’s 5,500 per day! If you worked 24 hours a day with no breaks, you’d have to read 1 paper every 16 seconds just to keep up. That’s a new theory on solar geoengineering, a new AI technique, a new way of engineering proteins, a new approach to treating cancer, every 16 seconds. 

 This unprecedented rate of discovery is an unqualified good. Every modern marvel, from the phone in your hand to the internet delivering you this post to the medicine you take, started as a science experiment. Fundamental research is the fuel of human progress and the discoveries are accelerating. Today more PhD’s are toiling and more money is being spent on research than at any point in human history.    

 The problem, however, is that the explosion in research has not led to a proportional surge in breakthrough products or inventions — most notably in pharmaceuticals . While there have been incredible advances in fields like autonomous vehicles, quantum computing, and longevity, in many other areas the gains are less profound , require greater resources, take longer, and cost more to produce than they used to. 

 This dynamic has many facets, but it starts with the “too much research problem.” The first step in any experiment is the literature review. This is a tedious, painstaking process by which a researcher sets out to first understand a problem, what work has been done before, the questions that have been answered, the ones that haven’t, and to begin to think about how one might structure an experiment in virgin territory to fill in any gaps. 

 This winnowing process, typically, relies on tools such as Google Scholar, which procure lists of PDFs of previous papers — some of them relevant, many of them not — based on basic keyword searches. These must then be read assiduously, and will often lead to new strands as a researcher follows a citation to a new paper, which in turn leads to another, and another. In a world where new papers pop up every 16 seconds, this winnowing process is hugely time-consuming and deeply inefficient. The problem of information overload is a giant speed bump on the road to progress. A survey back in 2016, when academic output was 40% lower than today, found that researchers spent at least 7 hours per week simply looking for information — ~20% of their

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