You Know How You Feel Overwhelmed With Content on Social Media? Well, a Similar Thing Is Happening in Science.

"Peer review is the quality filter behind safe medicines, infrastructure standards, and daily technologies. It is imperfect, but it is the best system we have for turning raw claims into reliable knowledge."

"The volume of manuscripts has outgrown the capacity of the people who are supposed to evaluate them. One study found that the number of published articles increased by nearly 50 percent from 2016 to 2022."

"The big five scientific publishers currently host around 50,000 journals, all of which need to be fed continuous content. The journal menu is enormous."

The peer review process is crucial for ensuring the quality of scientific work, but it faces challenges due to a significant increase in manuscript submissions. The number of published articles rose nearly 50 percent from 2016 to 2022, while research budgets and workforce sizes have not kept pace. This growth is driven by a business model that encourages more frequent publications, leading to a strain on the peer review system and potentially compromising the reliability of scientific knowledge.

Read at Slate Magazine