Growth rates of modern science: a latent piecewise growth curve approach to model publication numbers from established and new literature databases

Abstract

Growth of science is a prevalent issue in science of science studies. In recent years, two new bibliographic databases have been introduced, which can be used to study growth processes in science from centuries back: Dimensions from Digital Science and Microsoft Academic. In this study, we used publication data from these new databases and added publication data from two established databases (Web of Science from Clarivate Analytics and Scopus from Elsevier) to investigate scientific growth processes from the beginning of the modern science system until today. We estimated regression models that included simultaneously the publication counts from the four databases. The results of the unrestricted growth of science calculations show that the overall growth rate amounts to 4.10% with a doubling time of 17.3 years. As the comparison of various segmented regression models in the current study revealed, models with four or five segments fit the publication data best. We demonstrated that these segments with different growth rates can be interpreted very well, since they are related to either phases of economic (e.g., industrialization) and/or political developments (e.g., Second World War). In this study, we additionally analyzed scientific growth in two broad fields (Physical and Technical Sciences as well as Life Sciences) and the relationship of scientific and economic growth in UK. The comparison between the two fields revealed only slight differences. The comparison of the British economic and scientific growth rates showed that the economic growth rate is slightly lower than the scientific growth rate.

COVID-19 and the scientific publishing system: Growth, open access and scientific fields

“…We first aimed to fit standard growth models, such as exponential or logistic growth models, which have typically been employed to model scientific output growth (see, for example, Bornmann et al, 2021;Egghe & Rao 1992). The two growth models did not fit the data well enough for them to be used for forecasting.…”

“…The average growth in scientific publications is estimated to be 4% per annum, doubling approximately every 17 years (Bornmann et al, 2021). And for developing countries total growth is estimated to be 8.6% (National Science Foundation, 2018).…”

“…These studies reflect continued efforts to identify distributions and models which can best adjust to different types of scientific literature in different conditions. In general terms, these studies describe science as a complex ecosystem (van Raan, 2000), which grows exponentially, and is sensitive to social, political and economic developments (Bornmann et al, 2021), following differing patterns by field (Egghe & Rao, 1992).…”

Physiological research in an attention economy

“…Firstly, imagine a Venn diagram of your specialty and the journal's focus, and see what has already been published successfully 1 . When analysing submission statistics, we found, as in previous years, a few outstanding publications 9‐11 in terms of readers' interest and citations generated 12 .…”

“…Scientific data output, as measured by the number of peer‐reviewed publications, is growing exponentially. A current analysis based on publication counts from four common databases [Dimensions, Microsoft Academic, Web of Science and Scopus] show a current overall growth rate of 4.1%, with a doubling time of 17.3 years 1 . Both the number of publications per outlet as well as the number of outlets increases 2 .…”