[RightWhale]

There's more data coming in every day than can be processed in a year and a lot of it is available to anyopne on the Internet in raw form. We ought to be up to our reading glasses in scientific articles. But we're not. Must be something more to the story.

[Junior]

My wife is currently working on her Master's in psychology. Part of her course work is preparing work for peer review. Raw data is useless until statistical methods are applied to it (to make sure, among other things, that the data are not simply statistical anomolies).

[general_re]

We ought to be up to our reading glasses in scientific articles. But we're not.

One of the joys of dealing with academics in general is that they've become so narrowly specialized that they have precious little idea of what's happening outside their own particular sub-sub-field. Not that this is anyone's fault in particular, that there are no more Renaissance Men these days - it's a hell of a lot of work keeping up with one's own field, let alone all the rest.

There are not thousands of scientific articles published each year - there are hundreds of thousands. Agricola indexes more than 800 journals dealing with agriculture and plant sciences alone. Ovid indexes more than a thousand journals in medicine and biomedical sciences. Ingenta - I've lost track, but they index 28,000 academic journals, so you can browse through and figure out how many of those are scientific journals. The IEEE INSPEC database indexes more than 3400 scientific and technical journals - to quote them, their database consists of "over 7 million bibliographic records and is growing at the rate of 350,000 records each year."

Most of it's flying under your radar, so you don't notice it - the vast majority of that stuff is not of interest to the vast majority of the human race, because it's not their particular specialty. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Believe me, if you knew where to look, you would be up to your reading glasses - and way beyond - in scientific articles.