alt Hacker NewsWhen I was doing my phd, around 2 decades ago, I was often going to the library’s compactus to fish for a Phys Rev from the 80s. Back then papers were sparse and expensive. But the quality!
The Higgs boson is 3 papers, 6 authors and 6 pages in total!
At the end of my phd, 30++ pages slop papers were the norm.
Nowadays, well..
The paper by Higgs was one page. The guy probably published less than a hundred pages in his career.
One reason that made me abandon a career was the disgust caused by the publishing frienzy.
And now tokens..
There is an obscure topic where I have read basically every single dissertation, study, etc on that topic (or even just articles that mention it). It is very noticeable how much briefer older publications were.
It would be impossible to do that today. I guess I could have an LLM just summarise all the papers…