Someone once posted on the Internet that very few people read university journals, but it costs a lot of money to run these journals, so it was recommended that all university journals be closed.
The logic of this post is: no matter what the publication is, the criterion for measuring whether it is useful or not is whether there are more or fewer people looking at it. If more people read it, it is useful, and fewer people read it, so it is useless, and it should be discontinued. The logic is clear, the question is whether the usefulness of a journal can be measured and determined by the number of readers it hasApparently not, why?
First of all, we must know that although they are all articles, they are all written in words, but the content of the articles and articles is different. The content of some articles is very simple, and the exposition is nothing more than some very simple ideas, and this kind of article can be read by ordinary people. Some of the articles are very complex and the ideas they expound are so profound that only professionals can read them. Generally speaking, readers are only willing to read articles that they can understand, and are not willing to read those articles that they can't read, so there will be more readers of the former type of articles and fewer or even fewer readers of the latter type of articles.
Can we judge that the former is useful and the latter is useless?Of course not. Because, the latter category of articles is the latest achievement, the highest achievement of our human cognition of our world, the former category of articles is not. In popular parlance, the latter type of article has a high gold content, while the former type of article has a low gold content.
Of course, both types of articles have their own usefulness and cannot be substituted for each other. But we must know that if a society only has some recreational and entertaining publications, and readers only read a few recreational and entertaining articles every day, then the society will not progress. Therefore, university journals should not only not be suspended, but should also make greater efforts to run them well.
Journal of Universities.