Not a Bug but a Feature

A common reaction to data on research visibility goes something like: “Most papers go unread? The whole academic system is broken.” It’s an understandable response. But I think it gets the diagnosis wrong.

Science has always been social. Robert Merton, writing in the 1940s, identified communalism as one of the constitutive norms of science: findings are the common heritage of the scientific community, and the obligation to communicate them is built into what science is. A result locked in a desk drawer isn’t doing science. Bruno Latour put it more provocatively: a claim doesn’t really become a fact until other researchers take it up, cite it, build on it, argue with it. Circulation isn’t downstream of knowledge production — it’s part of it.

This is why I push back on the “broken system” framing. If I publish a paper and it moves no one — no reader, no citation, no conversation — did I actually contribute something to the field? Humans are social creatures. Science is a human endeavor. The need to find your audience isn’t a flaw in the system; it’s closer to the whole point.

Where things genuinely do go wrong is the Matthew effect, also Merton’s term: attention compounds. Established researchers get seen, which gets them cited, which gets them seen more. Early-career researchers, with networks still forming, fall on the wrong side of that feedback loop — not because their work is weaker, but because nobody knows it exists yet.

So the problem isn’t that visibility matters. The problem is that visibility is unequally distributed in ways that have little to do with the quality of the work. Lowering the cost of strategic outreach — helping good work find the people who should know about it — isn’t gaming the system. It’s leveling it.

References

Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.

Merton, Robert K. “The Matthew Effect in Science.” Science 159, no. 3810 (1968): 56–63.

Merton, Robert K. The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973.