I got a PhD in EE and wanted to say that this feeling is by no means unique to humanities (modulo, of course, some differences between disciplines, e.g. https://xkcd.com/451/): I remember the first time (many more such moments followed), while hunting down relevant references for a paper I was writing through stacks, and stacks of volumes of IEEE Transactions on PAMI, Information Theory and what have you at Purdue's Potter Engineering Library (pre-XPlore days) and suddenly being struck with the understanding that 99.9% of these articles would not be read by anyone and my painstakingly polished paper will be among these, if it's accepted, that is.
Years later, toward graduation, I heard of a practice that empirically tested this assertion: Colleagues putting $20 bills into the bound version of their theses that were placed in the library to see if they were consulted by students.
Years later, toward graduation, I heard of a practice that empirically tested this assertion: Colleagues putting $20 bills into the bound version of their theses that were placed in the library to see if they were consulted by students.