Subduing the Deluge in Soil Science: What If Each Researcher Published Only One Paper Per Year?

ABSTRACT Soil science, like most disciplines, is increasingly inundated with surplus articles, straining effective peer review, diluting standards of originality, and burying new insights in the deluge. To elicit discourse on this issue, we pose, as a thought experiment, the question: What would happen if every researcher were limited to publishing one peer‐reviewed paper per year? Among other benefits, such a constraint might: amplify scientific merit, bolster peer review, enhance readability, encourage writing for wider audiences, elevate marginal voices, free up thinking time, promote interdisciplinary research, elevate the stature of soil science, and promote scientists' mental health and creativity. Given these potential merits, we propose some potential avenues for taming the current whelming flood of papers. A strict limit of one paper per researcher per year may not yet be logistically plausible, but this thought experiment may engender ways of re‐enlivening the soil science literature, now so crucial for averting socioecological decline in ecosystems worldwide.