Least Publishable Unit (LPU)

I've come across an interesting phenomenon today. Two of the journal articles I wanted to see were not available through Caltech's library or online subscriptions. I could request the articles through the library for a fee. I don't have a sense of how good they are, but one of them sounds really interesting. This count of two doesn't include the several articles that are not translated into english. Caltech doesn't have the breadth library holdings of a giant university like UCLA, but still, it's well funded enough that we have good online access. These articles and the journals they are in are obscure. I've done a detailed reading of research in lousy journals and found some terrible stuff. I don't specifically remember finding good stuff, but it must be there. As you can see from my interest in obtaining these articles, I haven't given up on obscurely published work yet. Here are two schools of thought about poor quality research (from http://www.lib.lsu.edu/collserv/lrts/ST13.html):

MIT biology professor Richard Young was quoted as doubting whether the scientific enterprise would suffer if the bottom 80% of the literature would just vanish (Hamilton 1990).

Seglen (1992) was perhaps correct when he ascribed the skewed pattern of citations to the operation of a basic probability distribution. He theorized that the skewness implies that there will always be a large fraction of uncited articles that will be impossible to eliminate for statistical reasons. The zero [citation] class is probably a necessary part of the cost of doing science and technology