The point is 1.2 million papers per year is about 900,000 to many. You cannot look at me in they eye and tell me there are 1.2 million “discoveries” per year.
Some--roughly 10%-- of those papers are reviews, some are case studies, some are method papers, some are clinical trials, some are basic research, some are applied research, etc.
Considering the fact that there are a LOT of topics being researched, and that it takes quite a bit of effort to make a new discovery, and that each discovery is just a tiny sliver of knowledge within the topic, I think that number sounds pretty reasonable.
“You cannot look at me in they eye and tell me there are 1.2 million “discoveries” per year.”
Yes I can. There are some incremental papers that report on progress of a line of research, but there are many many discoveries every year. Go to a library and read Nature, Science, and any science journals thy have (best to go to a university library).
When I was working in infrared astronomy detectors and the related defense applications of that tech (a relatively small area of science), there were hundreds of relevant papers per year, sometimes more, multiply that by 10,000 science or engineering fields and you get a LOT of articles and papers.
Genetics and genomics generates several thousand relevant papers annually. I get Journal Of Forensic Sciences, there are fifty or sixty relevant “discoveries” per month, like new ways to get latent prints off of rifle brass or ways to determine the age of a skeleton left out in the elements for six years.