Is the Number of Papers on a Topic a Good Indicator of its Importance?

The Wikipedia entry on “Global Cooling” dismisses the idea that it was the prevailing view in the 1970’s by showing the numbers of papers on cooling versus the number on warming. Does this truly support the author’s claim?

In this post, I describe a fictitious experiment and then draw up a non-complete list of papers that could be produced from the experiment.

I then show a real-life example of this sort of “paper-churning”. Continue reading “Is the Number of Papers on a Topic a Good Indicator of its Importance?”