Less citation, commercial availability - Manufacture of Ignorance .

"Yet, in Science of all places, there is evidence to the contrary: Using a database of 34 million articles, their citations (1945 to 2005), and online availability (1998 to 2005) … as more journal issues came online, the articles referenced tended to be more recent, fewer journals and articles were cited, and more of those citations were to fewer journals and articles … the number of years of commercial availability [of a journal online] appears to significantly increase concentration of citations to fewer articles within a journal … These changes likely mean that the shift from browsing in print to searching online facilitates avoidance of older and less relevant literature … If online researchers can more easily find prevailing opinion, they are more likely to follow it, leading to more citations referencing fewer articles. (Evans 2008, 395, 398)"


"This is just Definition I (vacuum theory) and is a perfectly healthy phenomenon, a prophylactic for the besetting sin of hubris so common among intellectuals. Likewise, the exponential growth of scientific publication renders it impossible to aspire to the status of true polymath and stay on top of everything. This is Definition 2 (bounded rationality) and is just one important aspect of our cognitive predicament, that attention and memory are limited. Of course, we are impelled to develop rules of thumb (and computer prosthetics) in order to navigate our way through a world far richer than our paltry abilities to grasp it. Who would argue otherwise? Yet, beyond those two phenomena, when whole sets of institutions are deliberately bent to sow doubt, to spew out a fog of contrarian results, to reassure the uneducated that the truth is whatever they want it to be,7 to treat the unequal distribution of knowledge as the natural dictate of freedom of choice and simultaneously to praise the innate “wisdom of crowds,” then a surfeit of ignorance is the inevitable intentional consequence. This is Definition 3, the manufacture of ignorance."


Science Mart 2011 - Mirowski

Junk Science - Philip Mirowski (2011)

The key tenets were to promote otherwise isolated scientific spokespersons (recruited from gold-plated universities, if possible) who would take the industry side in the debate, manufacture uncertainty about the existing scientific literature, launder information through seemingly neutral third-party fronts, and wherever possible recast the debate by moving it away from aspects of the science that it would seem otherwise impossible to challenge. As one famous tobacco company memo put it:

"Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the “body of fact” that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy. Within the business we recognize that a controversy exists. However, with the general public the consensus is that cigarettes are in some way harmful to the health. If we are successful in establishing a controversy at the public level, then there is an opportunity to put across the real facts about smoking and health. Doubt is also the limit of our “product”… Truth is our message because of its power to withstand a conflict and sustain a controversy. If in our procigarette efforts we stick to well documented fact, we can dominate a controversy and operate with the confidence of justifiable self-interest"

Science Mart 2011 - P Mirowski