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From: jkpachl@watdaisy.UUCP (Jan Pachl)
Newsgroups: sci.math,sci.research
Subject: How many people read an average research paper?
Message-ID: <7966@watdaisy.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 5-Nov-86 09:37:02 EST
Article-I.D.: watdaisy.7966
Posted: Wed Nov  5 09:37:02 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 5-Nov-86 22:51:23 EST
Distribution: sci
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
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Xref: mnetor sci.math:132 sci.research:12

Question:
---  How many people read an average research paper? ---

Has anyone considered (or even investigated) this question?
Obviously, the question is ill-posed; one would have to define
"research paper", "average", and "read".  Has anyone
tried to answer the question for _any_ reasonable definition
of those terms?

Perhaps a good definition of a reader for this purpose would be
"someone who has spent enough time on the paper to learn more
than what could be found from a short abstract".

Other related questions (e.g. "how many research papers quote
an average research paper?") are much easier to formulate
precisely (and to answer), but they are not as interesting.

Jan Pachl,   University of Waterloo