A lot of the comments are about the rate of scientific progress being unnecessarily low in general, but I understood the article to be about the relative rate of progress in different fields. The authors findings suggest that not only is the marginal impact of individual publications greater in fields with fewer papers, but even the field as a whole moves forward faster with a slower publication rate!
As a current PhD student, this seems very plausible. Wading through the sheer volume of prior work is ridiculous, especially in my current field (cryptography) where actually reading and understanding all the technical details in a single paper can take a full work day (or more). Fewer papers with more meaningful results would make the field so much more accessible.
Yup. I prefer old papers because, among other reasons, they tended to finish a line of investigation before publishing. Nowadays, due to pressure to inflate publication numbers, the same amount of research gets chopped up and spread out over 2-3 publications. It's not just 2-3 times harder to read -- it's worse because I have to keep referring between them to understand things.
At least in my field (plasma physics), review articles are published infrequently, at random intervals, and their coverage is arbitrary (ie, even if they are nominally concerned with the topic you are interested in, which isn't guaranteed, they may leave out the particular facet of the topic that is of interest to you).
I wish there were incentives/support for more regular/frequent review articles with broader coverage; that would have been a huge help as a grad student.
