> 3) We (academics) could try to judge research by how many people read the work in question and get something out of it. Maybe we need a system for recording readers’ ratings of philosophical articles.<p>> 5) We could continue the status quo. Almost everyone just keeps ignoring almost all academic writing.<p>The philosophy is weird.. in both CS and physics, having your paper read is very important. People pay a lot of attention (sometimes too much attention) to personal "number of citations" and "impact factor" of the journals/conferences where one gets published. And seeing the number of citations of your paper grow gives you a nice fuzzy feeling that what you are doing is not useless.<p>And thinking about, this makes a lot of sense -- over my grad student carrer, I have looked at thousands of papers, and fully read/understood at least a hundred. At the same time, I have produced less than a dozen papers myself. Even with a "long tail" distribution, this means that I should expect hundreds of readers for any paper, and at least a few citations.