The academic news in brief

Are there too many academic journals in the world, and too many articles being published? Far be it from us to complain that there’s too much science – it genuinely doesn’t feel like that when listening to certain politicians – but we have heard specialists complain over the years that they can’t keep up. By some estimates there are two million articles published in peer-reviewed journals a year: in the field of oncology, one team found 90 000 papers published between 2012 and 2017, with Chinese scientists alone publishing around 6 000 a year. So hurrah, then, for TLDRs, developed by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. It does what it says it does, and quickly summarises papers so specialists can skim read.