There are a lot of scientific papers out there. One estimate puts the count at 1.8 million articles published each year, in about 28,000 journals. Who actually reads those papers? According to one 2007 study, not many people: half of academic papers are read only by their authors and journal editors, the study's authors write.
But not all academics accept that they have an audience of three. There's a heated dispute around academic readership and citation—enough that there have been studies about reading studies going back for more than two decades.