Rise in higher education researchers and academic publications

Abstract

Background: How many higher education researchers are there in the world? How many academic articles are published by researchers each year? This paper aims to answer these two questions by tracking the number of higher education teachers and the number of publications over the past four decades. Methods: We collected data on the number of higher education institutions and researchers from the United Nations, the World Bank, and the U.S., China, and U.K. governments (three countries with the largest number of academic publications in recent years). We used Scopus to obtain the number of publications per year. The growth of higher education researchers and academic publications were characterized using 4-parameter logistic models. Results: The number of higher education teachers-cum-researchers increased from 4 million in 1980 to 13.1 million in 2018 worldwide. Concurrently, the number of academic publications increased from 0.65 million in 1980 to 3.16 million in 2018 based on data from Scopus. At the country level, the number of academic publications from the U.S. increased from 0.15 million in 1980 to 0.70 million in 2018, while that from China increased by almost 1,000 times from 629 in 1980 to 0.60 million in 2018. Conclusions: The number of higher education researchers would reach 13.6 million and they would publish 3.21 million academic articles in 2020, imposing enormous pressure to publishers, peer-reviewers, and people who want to understand emerging scientific development. Additionally, not all academic publications are easily assessable because most articles are behind pay-walls. In addition, unethical research practices including falsification, fabrication, plagiarism, slicing publication, publication in a predatory journal or conference, etc. may hinder scientific and human development.

Using, Analyzing and Evaluating Eye-tracking at Different Educational Levels: Towards an Evaluation Framework for Impact Assessment

“…We collected data from three online databases using several combinations of search terms at two points of time: on 10th of September 2019 and on 10th of March 2021. For our original intention to analyze the development of publications we cannot use two online databases EBSCO host and Web of Science: They present radical decreases of publications what is not in line with the search results from Google scholar, personal observations and latest studies that only report continuous increases for almost all topics and disciplines [21], [22]. The explanation for these radical decreases can be simply found in the changes of the subscriptions for both online databases leading to huge limitations of access and reduced search results.…”

“…The focus on impact assessment as well as its relevance is strongly growing in education demanding for analysis and evaluation instruments to measure impact [20]. In addition, the numbers of scientific publications are constantly increasing since the beginning of 20th century [21] and in particular in the 21st century [22]. Therefore, we will analyze in the following first, whether a generic evaluation framework for impact assessment already exists.…”

Publishing at Any Cost? The Need for the Improvement of the Quality of Scholarly Publications

“…A more transparent and inclusive peer-review process, being open to public scrutiny, may add to the solution by separating quality journals from others, thus legitimising the former (Dobusch & Heimstä dt, 2019;Teixeira da Silva & Tsigaris, 2018;To & Yu, 2020;Serpa & Ferreira, 2019). Table 5 provides an overview of open peer-review practices and their description.…”

“…The circumstances described above created the conditions for the emergence of important problems related to the quantity and, mainly, the quality of this type of publications (Kimotho, 2019;To & Yu, 2020). Among these concerns, To and Yu (2020) highlight the increasing demand, in an open-access environment, for scientific papers and data, which, in turn, causes a greater demand for works published in a short time, with the risk of a lower quality peer review, which will reflect, unavoidably, also on the low quality of published papers. This intensification in demand increases the number of predatory journals, which frequently causes academic flaws, notably fabrication, falsification, plagiarism and duplicate publication, among other issues, which are cause for serious concern.…”

What if Peer-Review Process Is Killing Thinking-Out-of-the-Box Science?

“…These are often disconnected from the genuine goals of science, such as producing out-of-the-box ideas that are generally difficult to spread and accept (Wang et al, 2017;Mairesse and Pezzoni, 2021) or subjecting previous proposals to empirical testing to explore their reliability, a type of task that Scheiner (2013) considered as deficient in ecology. Thus, most researchers spend their time trying to get the ball rolling in this environment (Milem et al, 2000;Link et al, 2008).We are living in a zeitgeist where the number of scientific contributions is steadily increasing year after year, with hundreds of thousands of available journals to showcase our work (Larsen and Von Ins, 2010;To and Yu, 2020). However, this spectacular increase of production is not correlated to the number of new ideas, ways of thinking, or, at least, "discoveries" (Fried, 2020;Bhattacharya and Packalen, 2020).…”