Is Too Much Enough?

When the Elwood boys advanced beyond the toddler stage and acquired a prolific ability to wreak havoc on their domestic surroundings, this Journal's editor would try in vain to reduce the amount of destruction by offering the following sage parental advice, "Too much is enough boys, too much is enough." Although the words produced little effect, they have remained with this editor over the decades, particularly in the context of the exponential growth in the number of periodicals and the manuscripts contained in them. It is estimated that there are more than 34,000 scientific, medical, and technical peer-reviewed scholarly journals that publish nearly 2.5 million articles a year, the equivalent of a manuscript every 13 seconds. Moreover, according to the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers, the number of journals and articles published in those fields has grown by between 3 and 3.5% a year for the past two centuries. A question that may be worth pondering is whether this growth is good or bad.