Because they have to write and publish so many studies, young scientists hardly get to read other studies.
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Younger humanities scholars hardly ever read scientific publications anymore because they are too busy writing them themselves. A guest post.
VA few years ago, the American sociologist Andrew Abbott pointed to dramatic changes in the professional reading behavior of humanities and social scientists in his country. It is precisely in the area of what is rightly called “book studies”, he finds, that individual researchers practically no longer have the time to read and study the texts of their colleagues, and as a result their science also loses social cohesion. Abbott traces this crisis of mutual reading back to a more recent historical turning point: while American universities went through a phase of steady growth in the first two thirds of the last century, this trend came to a standstill in the 1970s.
The effects of this change on the willingness to read of scientists result from its consequences for the age composition in faculties and disciplines. In that phase of constant job growth, every professor should find more than just one successor, so at any given time significantly more younger scientists were needed than older ones. Since the end of growth, this size advantage for young scientists has come to an end, because since then, statistically speaking, each professor has only trained one successor in the course of his scientific life.