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According to PubMed, approximately one paper is added to its database every minute. This number is even more overwhelming when you realise that PubMed’s journal list is not exhaustive – many aren’t included. Furthermore, according to Luis Amaral, a new Faculty Member in Ecology, “Over a million new research articles are catalogued every year by Web of Science“.

So how do scientists keep up with the vast number of articles published in their field? Well, unfortunately, they can’t, and that – if you’ll allow me to go off on a short tangent – is why Faculty of 1000 was created: experts in their respective fields highlight the most important papers and provide opinion on why exactly they’re important.

But I digress – knowing how hard it is to keep up with the literature, how do we know we haven’t missed something important? Could at least a fraction of what doctors think they know to be true then be factually inaccurate? The German-Swiss physician and scientist Philipus A. Paracelsus (1493-1541) once said, “Medicine is not only a science; it is also an art.” With this in mind, what part do assumptions play in medical and scientific knowledge?

Amaral questions this in his evaluation of a paper examining how 28 cancer experts differed in their understanding of the complex biological phenomenon of cancer metastasis, a process that has enormous medical importance. The authors of the study found that, despite agreeing on the individual steps of metastasis, no two expert-proposed scenarios were identical.

This led Amaral to question whether we should be so confident in what we think is factual information:

We believe that we know what others have claimed to have discovered, and that any important developments affecting our research area will eventually become known to us. In an elegant and original manner, Divoli et al. demonstrate that those beliefs are not supported by the evidence.

He goes on to explain that he has come across many an article citing his work in the wrong context, even using it support the opposite claim from the one he made. He says that Divoli’s “work supports the need to revamp the manner in which we publish our research.” We at F1000 agree, and perhaps the answer also lies in the way research is disseminated and shared.

Last year, Arif Jinha from the University of Ottawa estimated that the number of articles published since journals came into existence surpassed 50 million articles in 2009. No wonder Amaral describes biomedical literature as a library of Babel:

…too many potential sources where the nuggets we are looking for could be hidden.