Journal of Enhanced Heat Transfer, 22 (2) (2015) ARE WE AT A NEW FRONTIER OF NEW AND TRANSFORMATIVE KNOWLEDGE GENERATION ... OR SIMPLY PUBLISHING FOR ITS OWN SAKE? Communicating new discoveries, hypotheses that explain natural or engineered systems along with experimental and/or modeling information to substantiate them, and the func- tional workings of new devices or technologies by writing peer-reviewed papers has been the hallmark of scientific knowledge generation and dissemination from very ancient times. Inherent in this process is the assimilation of past knowledge through reading and learning from the already reported work; this process was also true in ancient “oral tra- ditions” that lacked written records. An equally important aspect of scientific writing is that complex ideas should be disseminated such that they can be understood by a much larger audience and is just not confined to the domain-specific community. This ancient principle of scientific documentation has also been articulated by many scientists in the 20th century. Two particularly eloquent expressions of this view are quoted by Gary Zukav on a preamble page of his quintessential everyman’s science book: The Dancing Wu Li Masters (Bantam, New York, NY, 1984), and they are as follows: “Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone.” – Albert Einstein ∗ “Even for the physicist the description in plain language will be a criterion of the degree of understanding that has been reached.” – Werner Heisenberg † While for Gary Zukav these statements were the guiding principles in his attempt to explain quantum mechanics, relativity, and the cosmic dance of physics to a “lay” readership, they are indeed necessary reminders to all of us as well in today’s world of technical publishing. The current explosive growth in publications, both in number of papers and in number of journals, suggests a new frontier of enormous information generation. A careful assessment ‡ suggests otherwise. The trend appears to be that of ∗ A. Einstein and L. Infeld, The Evolution of Physics, Simon and Schuster, New York, NY, p. 27, 1938. † W. Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, Harper and Row, New York, NY, p. 168, 1958. ‡ J. Kaur, E. Ferrara, F. Menczer, A. Flammini, and F. Radicchi, “Quality versus Quantity in Scientific Impact,” Journal of Informetrics, Vol. 9, pp. 800–808, 2015. 1065–5131/15/$35.00 © 2015 by Begell House, Inc.