I agree that most academic research is a bad ROI but I find that a lot of this sort of ānobody reads researchā commentary is equating reads with citations which seems completely wrong. By that metric most forum posts would also not be read by anyone.
I agree-for one, the studies Iāve seen saying that the median publication is not cited are including conference papers, so if one is talking about the peer-reviewed literature, citations are significantly greater. Iāve estimated the average number of citations per paper is around 30 for the peer-reviewed literature. Furthermore, from what Iāve seen, the number of reads on places like ResearchGate and Academia.edu tend to be one to two orders of magnitude greater than the number of citations. So I think a reasonable expectation for a peer-reviewed paper is hundreds or thousands of reads.
I agree-for one, the studies Iāve seen saying that the median publication is not cited are including conference papers, so if one is talking about the peer-reviewed literature, citations are significantly greater. Iāve estimated the average number of citations per paper is around 30 for the peer-reviewed literature. Furthermore, from what Iāve seen, the number of reads on places like ResearchGate and Academia.edu tend to be one to two orders of magnitude greater than the number of citations. So I think a reasonable expectation for a peer-reviewed paper is hundreds or thousands of reads.