Most scholarly communication infrastructure operates on the document as the base unit
Even though we know that Scholarly argumentation operates on atomic statements and concepts as fundamental units, our scholarly communication infrastructure doesn’t make it easy for scholars to find and work with these units: far from it! In reality today, scholars spend a lot of time and effort “breaking down” more complex components like papers and books into the constituent building blocks they actually care about (heuristics, findings, claims, concepts, definitions).
This directly conflicts with the idea that Compression facilitates synthesis, and might be one reason that effective synthesis is hard.