No one reads your paper anyway

In 2013, I wrote a blog post about why it’s important to publish scientific results that nobody will read. This is an updated version of this post.

Why should you do science? Why should you publish? No one is going to read your paper anyway. This is a common refrain raised by critics of the modern scientific enterprise. We publish too much. There are too many papers. Most papers aren’t getting read, and for sure aren’t getting cited. We should focus more on publishing the really good papers and not waste so much energy on all that low quality stuff.

I couldn’t disagree more. Working scientists must publish. Trying to increase publication quality by limiting publication quantity will not work, and it will lower both. In fact, telling a scientist they are producing too much science is similar to telling a musician they’re playing too much music, an artist they’re making too much art, or a novelist they’re writing too many books. It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what the craft is and how it is learned and practiced.

Photo by Bozhin Karaivanov on Unsplash

Of course I’m not saying you should write shoddy papers, papers that are poorly put together, not proof-read, not well referenced, and ultimately not reproducible. Every paper you write should meet basic standards of scientific rigor. Beyond this minimum bar, however, it’s fine if the majority of your papers are neither groundbreaking nor highly influential. I write about six papers a year, and my own personal goal is that at least one of them is really good. One paper a year I can be proud of. It’s Ok if the other five don’t move the needle in terms of impact and notoriety. This rule of thumb seems to have worked out well for my career.

But if the majority of papers are inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, is there any reason to write them at all? Why not just write one big hit a year, or whenever it’s ready, and leave all the minor studies unpublished? In the following, I will present four arguments for why writing the minor studies is critical for your career development and growth as a scientist.

Quality tends to correlate with quantity. In your field, how many people do you know who publish one Nature or Science paper a year and not much else? I can think of maybe one or two people who have made that strategy work for them, but I’d argue that they are successful despite their publishing approach and not because of it. For most people, productivity and impact tend to be correlated. The most prolific scientists also write the most widely-read papers and vice versa. It’s just like in the music business: You need to write a lot of songs to write a hit, and the people that write many hits also tend to write many many songs that aren’t hits. And, more importantly, it’s difficult to predict which songs will be hits and which will flop.

Let me illustrate this idea with an example from my own career. In 2001 I wrote seven papers. Five of the seven have been quite successful over the years, and have been cited over 100 times each as of summer 2025. One of them, a Nature paper, remains among my all-time most cited papers, with about 800 citations total as of this writing according to Google Scholar. When we wrote that paper, I was pretty sure we had a big story, so the success of that paper was somewhat expected. The second-most cited paper of that year, however, which at present has about 165 citations, was a total surprise. Notably, this paper was also one of my fastest ever from original idea to submission. I had a cute idea one afternoon, did a few calculations for a day or two, wrote a simulation in a few more days, and after a little over a week the entire paper was done and out the door. When I submitted this paper, I had no idea whether it was even publishable. Yet it got printed, and people really liked it. For the other papers I wrote in 2001, I also was skeptical whether anybody would ever care about them, and in the end five of the seven did rather well. It would have been easy for me to be more selective in 2001 and write only 2 or 3 papers, but if I had done that I’d have missed out on writing a couple of well-received papers.

This leads me to lesson 1:

You don’t know which of your papers other people will like. The more you publish, the higher the chance that something you write is useful to somebody.

Frequent publishing builds an audience. My next point applies to scientific publishing just as it does to blogging, writing on Substack, or making YouTube videos: You need to build an audience. If you regularly publish on a topic, people will start to take notice. They will make it a habit to keep an eye on your work, even if they don’t spend a lot of time actually reading your papers. Then, when you finally publish something really good, you have an audience ready and waiting. The exact same paper, published by somebody nobody has never heard of, might not get the same reception. In fact (and I’m not saying this is right, just stating how things are), it might not even make it through peer review the same way.

Thus here is lesson 2:

You need to keep publishing regularly so people are aware of you and take you more seriously.

There’s a limit to this, of course. If all you ever publish is useless drivel then you’ll eventually gain a reputation for publishing useless drivel. Stick to my guideline from the beginning of this post, publish at least one paper a year that is actually good, and make sure all your papers meet basic standards of scientific rigor.

Frequent publishing develops skills. The next point applies equally to any craft: You need to produce a lot of work to get good. So, as a scientists, you need to write a lot of papers to get good at writing.¹ With every paper you write, you get a little better. Therefore, even the papers that don’t have any content of consequence, where you know only three people will ever read them,² are worth writing just for the exercise. Can you imagine you made a major discovery, a real breakthrough, and then you didn’t have the skills to turn your results into an excellent paper? That’d be a disaster.

Thus, we arrive at lesson 3:

You need to publish as much as possible so you develop the writing and responding-to-reviewers skills that you will need to write your major hits.

Lesson 3 applies particularly to students and young postdocs. They need all the practice they can get and hence should publish a lot, even if some of their papers turn out thin and inconsequential.

Publishing clears the mind. My arguments so far can be summarized by saying that more publication quantity equals more publication quality. Some might raise the following objection: By writing fewer papers, they will say, they can put more effort into each one and hence raise the overall quality of their output. In other words, quantity can be detrimental to quality. I am not convinced by this argument. As I said earlier, one of the more successful papers early in my career took me all of two weeks to complete. At the same time, I could point you to papers that I put a huge amount of effort into and they never went anywhere. Impact doesn’t necessarily correlate with effort. More importantly, though, I believe that if one tries too hard to control quality both quality and quantity suffer. We need to publish papers so we are mentally ready to move on and write more, hopefully better, papers.

In fact, ideas for papers can hurt your productivity if you get stuck on them. The most insidious ideas are the marginally good ones, the ones that aren’t so bad that they are easily dismissed out of hand but also aren’t good enough that you want to rush to publication. Those kinds of ideas can drag down your productivity for years, because they divert your attention and energy while not going anywhere. The best thing you can do with those ideas is to just publish them and move on. It’s so much easier to dismiss an idea as bad once the paper is out. I have plenty of papers on my cv where I’m the first to say they are pretty pointless.³ But I don’t regret publishing them. If I hadn’t published these papers, maybe I’d still be thinking about the central ideas expressed in them.

Thus, the final lesson:

The best way to get a weak idea out of your head is to publish a paper on it. Don’t dwell on weak ideas, publish them and move on.

1. And no, you can’t use ChatGPT to make up for the shortcomings in your writing skills. It’s not going to write you a solid paper, and it’s also not going to learn anything from one paper to the next. And neither are you going to learn much about writing well if you outsource your writing.

2. Those three people are of course the three reviewers assigned during peer review. If the paper gets rejected the first time round and you resubmit elsewhere you may double your total readership.

3. For example, everything I published in 1998 and 1999.