| > nobody really reads that many papers That is very true. Nowadays, a good day for me is 3. We're too busy writing papers, writing grants, writing code, answering e-mails, filling out forms, or whatever. But I work at an institute that does a lot besides aging. I don't get the impression this is specific to the aging field. But on the other hand, the truth is that most papers do not have very much relevant information in them. There are millions of papers published per year. Aging is so interdisciplinary it would be foolish to think that if you just read J. Gerontology (now "GeroScience" lol, that was done to suck up to Felippe Sierra), Aging Cell, and a few others, you'll be caught up. That's why I went to the data. Even IF a human could read them all, most of the interesting data nowadays is high-throughput and is analyzed in the most shallow way within the text. The real beef is deposited in GEO or SRA. I am inclined to think that biology works in a way that is not very comprehensible to the human mind. For example, when humans design a system, it's modular, and you try to minimize the number of interdependencies between modules. In biology, it seems almost everything affects everything else, to the point that if someone publishes a paper saying "X upregulates Y", I find it almost irrelevant; they have, assuming everything was done correctly, characterized one edge in a very highly connected network. Probably the "X upregulates Y" is contextual as well. I don't know the solution to all this. I just wanted to do this as a career, and as a graduate student we very clearly learned that there are certain lines we need to color within if we wanted to be paid to do research. |