Towards sustainable academic research: should social scientists write less?

Abstract

The number of social science articles and books appearing each year is growing rapidly. In addition to academic writing, authors from other backgrounds are producing much more in the way of quasi-academic social science. The paper explains the causes of this expansion in writing and recognises that there have been some benefits from the growing volume of literature. Overall, however, it seems that the negative consequences outweigh the positive. So much writing makes it impossible to keep up with the academic literature, encourages readers to take all kinds of short-cuts and often encourages repetition of the same arguments, often by the same authors. Citation indices suggest that rather few articles or books are read by many people. While much of what is written is extremely good, arguably better than ever before, there is too much that is of dubious quality. In my opinion, the proliferation of literature risks damaging the social sciences, academia and indeed society at large. The key problem is that the best fruits of our research are too often ignored. The paper invites the Academy to debate the issue.