I'm in the natural sciences (astrophysics) and in my experience, virtually nobody has the time to read monographs anymore (specifically dissertations). Most people don't even read entire papers. I know my peers feel the same, but I wonder if there are any studies that have done research on this?
I'm also aware that in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, monographs also still play a much bigger role beyond the dissertation, and I found this article, which looks at publications and sales of monographs in those fields. They basically find that while print sales are down, the overall number of published monographs are up (due to digital publications). However, these fields have quite a different research/publication culture, and especially in times of exponential growth in the publication rate of all scientific literature and open access, the total number of publications is likely not representative for the number of reads.
They also don't discuss the recent decline in attention span due to the rise of the internet, mobile phones, and social media, etc. (see e.g. here or here), and the overwhelming amount of available resources and literature, which is forcing you to make tough decisions between what to read, and to allocate your time more efficiently than ever before. (I also found this interesting interview, but I did not find the study that they mention.)
EDIT:
Since this question was unfortunately closed for unjustified reasons, and people refuse to reinstate it, I cannot answer my own question. I thus post what I found out below, in hopes that it may be useful and informative to somebody else:
- In the Natural Sciences, the monograph has long been replaced by the journal article as the primary means of scholarly communication (e.g., Mabe 2009, 2010; Mabe et al. 2011; Ware et al. 2015; Johnson et al. 2018; Tenopir et al. 2019; Dietz 2022).
- Additionally, monographic dissertations are increasingly replaced by cumulative dissertations, which is a common format by now (e.g., Dong 1998; Wilson 1998; Sharmini et al. 2015; Autry et al. 2016; Frick 2016; Anderson et al. 2020, 2021; Donner 2021; Kubota et al. 2021; Paltridge et al. 2023).
- Even in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, where monographs still play an important role beyond the dissertation, the demise of the monograph is extensively debated (although the reasons for it are manifold and it's not just due to a lack of readership, e.g., Steele 2008; van der Weel 2015, 2016; Thomas et al. 2016; Crossick 2016; Mrva-Montoya 2016; Gould 2016; Paré 2019; Clark et al. 2020; Shaw et al. 2022).
- The human attention span (or at least the time that we allocate to any specific activity) may have significantly declined over the past two decades (e. g., Duffy et al. 2022; Ducharme 2023; Mark 2023; niplav 2023), while the number of scientific publications per year has massively increased over the same period.
- Consequently, it has never been more crucial to decide what to read and how much of it (e. g., Nicholas et al. 2004, 2007; Baron et al. 2021). As Baron (2015) aptly puts it: “One of the major effects of digital screens is to shift the balance from continuous reading to reading on the prowl ... The result? The meaning of ‘reading’ increasingly becomes ‘finding information’—and often setting for the first thing that comes to hand—rather than ‘contemplating and understanding’.”
So in conclusion, there are in fact studies on the reading behaviour of scientists (Nicholas et al. 2004, 2007; Baron et al. 2021), and they find that long-form reading is in decline. They don't address monographic dissertations specifically, but there is no reason to assume that this finding doesn't also apply to them. Additionally, the vanishing relevance of monographs in the Natural Sciences and the increasing popularity of cumulative dissertations show that there is a clear lack of interest in monographic dissertations.
I admit that this is still not a conclusive answer to the overarching question of my post "Do people still read monographic dissertations (in the Natural Sciences)?", but I think there is much evidence that people are likely not reading monographic dissertations in meaningful numbers anymore, at least not in the way that monographs are supposed to be read, which is front to back. Monographs derive their strength from their overarching coherence: ideally, every part was written with the whole in mind. That way, they should provide a better/more comprehensice picture to a reader than a cumulative dissertation might ever be able to achieve. But if monographic dissertations are not read as a whole anymore, they lose their defining strength. And in that way, I think it is fair to say that, indeed, people do not read monographic dissertations in a meaningful way anymore (at least in the Natural Sciences).
In fact, given that monographic dissertations only emerged in a form comparable to the current format during a time (around the 19th century, e.g., Allweiss 1979; Meadows 1980; Bazerman 1988; Kruse 2006; Paltridge et al. 2020) when journal papers began to completely replace monographs as the primary means of scientific communication in the Natural Sciences, I would even doubt if monographic dissertations were ever read in a way similar to how papers are read today.
