Recently I have become increasingly despairing about the sheer quantity of astronomy papers to read. Since my third year of grad school I have checked astro-ph daily, and the number of articles seems like it’s risen to the point that I can’t really do it as much as I would like to anymore. Astronomy journals have a very permissive publication policy where very few (if any?) papers are flat out rejected. I like this policy, it encourages people to share their work, but it makes the literature hard to read. Academic journals are supposed to be some measure of quality, and they are in astronomy, but there’s not really gradations of journals like other fields, and it’s also not clear that the highest prestige journals publish the best papers (in part due to financial incentives). As the number of people in astronomy and astrophysics grows, it just becomes too hard to keep up with everything.

At the same time, I have been thinking about how in a world full of AI slop (which is coming for publications whether we like it or not), how do we maintain quality of knowledge. Sadly, I think the golden age of good, free information is over. Once upon a time access to knowledge was incredibly restricted, and you had to have good connections to get that knowledge. There was a brief moment of time, where high quality information was free and available to anyone who could use the internet. But now we live in a world where there is too much information. Ironically, this effectively restricts information access again, because there’s too much for anyone to filter through individually.

Anyway thoughts aside, I have decided on a personal solution, which is also an excuse to try and get (back?) into academic blogging. Each month, I will publish the Monthly List of Papers Alex Likes (MLPAL). Here are the rules:

  • The paper must be available on arxiv
  • I have to have actually read the paper
  • I have to say what I liked
  • I have to post once a month, but it is OK for me to post no papers that I like. This will usually be because I didn’t have time to read that month.

There are no other rules. I can pick papers posted at any time, published or not, in any topic, by any author (including myself and my students), for any reason. It’s just papers I like. I think at this point in my career I have reasonable judgment so hopefully this will be useful for other people, but if it’s just for me that is fine too. I’ll start at the end of this month.