Peer-reviewed papers are getting increasingly boring
Stepping back a bit, I feel the argument is analogous to how music is becoming more mainstream and generic, how casual gamers &quot;corrupt&quot; the art form of gaming, how clickbait and stupit stuff is overshadowing lovingly curated independent websites, eternal September etc.<p>One answer to all these propositions is that the valuable stuff is still there, you just have an <i>additional</i> flood of mediocre boring predictable stuff. You can still find enough indie music and games and movies to spend all your free time on.<p>Similarly, if you know where to look and whose papers to watch out for, you can read more interesting stuff. The existence of more bullshit makes the filtering somewhat more effort, but it&#x27;s bearable.<p>Most papers are never deeply read anyway, outside of the reviewers. Even citations don&#x27;t mean someone really read the paper in depth.<p>So, most medíocre, boring papers get ignored.<p>It&#x27;s an illusion to expect that every researcher can pump out multiple really interesting non-boring papers every year. So we pretend. We write, we cite, we present, overiflate, overpromise etc. It must look like there is steady hard noble work and toil. It&#x27;s like a ritual. The scientists are writing all these papers so tax payers can sleep well that their money is paid for hard work.