Journals are meat and potatoes to scientific commerce, just as advertisements are to retail business and TV spots to politics.
Quality control has nothing to do with it.
William R. Hoffman 1848 Selby Ave. With all due respect, I take issue with Eugene Garfield s curt dismissal of recent provocative reports about the proliferation of journals. I share with many of my colleagues a great concern about the consequences of the explosion in published articles that has occurred over the last several years. There are two reasons why I find the huge volume of scientific literature distressing. First, Garfield may not find it taxing to read carefully the contents of the no more than 25 titles that an individual researcher needs to follow regularly.