2025 was a difficult year (to say the least) in the world of scholarly research, and the wider chaotic upheaval (global, although mostly arising from the US) was reflected here in The Scholarly Kitchen in many ways. From funding crises to the ongoing breakdown of the traditional peer review system to the damage being done by AI to both the environment and the scholarly record, our most-read post list this year seems particularly pessimistic.

Before we head into what, we can hope, will be a year filled with more positive change, a look back at 2025 is warranted.

We published 246 posts in 2025, one more than the previous year. Readership has become increasingly difficult to measure, as, like every other website, we have become constantly swamped by bots indexing our pages, presumably for AI training. Every few months, we see a huge spike of traffic from Ireland (I’m told the location of Amazon Web Services servers), and more recently from Germany. Subtracting these spikes, our traffic was roughly equivalent to the previous year.

Twitter/X, once our largest source of traffic referrals outside of search engines, has largely ceased to exist. LinkedIn remains for the second year in a row our top referrer, and Bluesky has climbed the charts and provides around 40% as many referrals as LinkedIn. It is perhaps worth mentioning, however, that traffic from social media is largely minuscule, certainly as compared to search engines or direct traffic. Referrals from search engines dropped 17% year-on-year from 2024, a harbinger of the onrushing Google Zero issue.

Guest posts surged in The Scholarly Kitchen, and now account for more than 45% of our content. This suggests we are continuing to fulfill our mission of providing a place for members of the community to have their voices heard. We also saw some significant turnover in the Kitchen, with Lettie Conrad being named Deputy Editor, and new Chefs Stephanie Lovegrove Hansen, Maryam Sayab, and Randy Townsend joining our ranks and several long-running Chefs rotating off of active duty.

Our top 10 most-read posts during the year were:

1. Dead as a Doornail
2. NIH Cuts ICR – Implications for Research Institutions and Scholarly Publishing
3. Guest Post — How the Growth of Chinese Research Is Bringing Western Publishing to Breaking Point
4. Declaration To #DefendResearch Against US Government Censorship
5. Subscribe-to-Open Is Doomed. Here’s Why.
6. 18 Life Lessons
7. Guest Post — Classification as Colonization: The Hidden Politics of Library Catalogs
8. Copyright’s Big Win in the First Decided US Artificial Intelligence Case
9. Guest Post — Beyond Classification: The Human Cost of Library and Information Labor Under Digital Capitalism
10. Mental Health Mondays: Occupational Burnout Prevention and Recovery

The only repeat from last year is the top spot, a 2021 post featuring a video on the etymology of an idiom, which, as far as I can tell, is just a quirk of search engines (one wonders whether this will remain a top post next year as AI summaries continue to overwhelm links to actual sources). Beyond that, I note that the words “Breaking Point,” “Censorship,” and “Doomed” are all featured, as well as a post on “Burnout,” which pretty well sums up 2025 as far as I’m concerned.

If one only looks at posts published in 2025, the top ten most read for the year were:

1. NIH Cuts ICR – Implications for Research Institutions and Scholarly Publishing
2. Guest Post — How the Growth of Chinese Research Is Bringing Western Publishing to Breaking Point
3. Declaration To #DefendResearch Against US Government Censorship
4. Subscribe-to-Open Is Doomed. Here’s Why.
5. Guest Post — Classification as Colonization: The Hidden Politics of Library Catalogs
6. Copyright’s Big Win in the First Decided US Artificial Intelligence Case
7. Guest Post — Beyond Classification: The Human Cost of Library and Information Labor Under Digital Capitalism
8. Mental Health Mondays: Occupational Burnout Prevention and Recovery
9. The Humanities as Canary: Understanding This Crisis Now
10. Guest Post — Trying to Write A Paper with LLM Assistance

So where will that lead us in 2026? The optimist in me thinks we’ll start to see some positive change, particularly with an election year in the US leading eventually to some proper oversight, and that as the damage being done by the runaway freight train of AI continues, we will hopefully start to see through the hype and recognize it as a useful tool for specialized purposes rather than the all-encompassing god-like machine we’ve been promised. I won’t spoil your shiny new year with thoughts from my pessimistic side. Where do you see things going? Let me know your thoughts below.