Growth rates of modern science: A bibliometric analysis based on the number of publications and cited references

By Lutz Bornmann, Rüdiger Mutz. J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol., 2014

1,467 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Many studies (in information science) have looked at the growth of science. In this study, we reexamine the question of the growth of science. To do this we (a) use current data up to publication year 2012 and (b) analyze the data across all disciplines and also separately for the natural sciences and for the medical and health sciences. Furthermore, the data were analyzed with an advanced statistical technique—segmented regression analysis—which can identify specific segments with similar growth rates in the history of science. The study is based on two different sets of bibliometric data: (a) the number of publications held as source items in the Web of Science (WoS, Thomson Reuters) per publication year and (b) the number of cited references in the publications of the source items per cited reference year. We looked at the rate at which science has grown since the mid‐1600s. In our analysis of cited references we identified three essential growth phases in the development of science, which each led to growth rates tripling in comparison with the previous phase: from less than 1% up to the middle of the 18th century, to 2 to 3% up to the period between the two world wars, and 8 to 9% to 2010.

Subfields: Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e281464d9a558cc1d25084687efb75683e65d4f0

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Citations in the corpus

Keyphrase Generation for Scientific Document Retrieval (2020, background): “With the exponential growth of the scientiﬁc literature (Bornmann and Mutz, 2015), retrieving relevant scientiﬁc papers becomes increasingly dif-ﬁcult.”
Photonic crystal resonances for sensing and imaging (2018, background): “growth rate in the total number of papers of approximately 3% [2].”
Can We Automate Scientific Reviewing? (2021, background): “The number of published papers is growing exponentially (Tabah, 1999; De Bellis, 2009; Bornmann and Mutz, 2015).”
ScispaCy: Fast and Robust Models for Biomedical Natural Language Processing (2019, background): “The publication rate in the medical and biomedical sciences is growing at an exponential rate (Bornmann and Mutz, 2014).”
ScholarBERT: Bigger is Not Always Better (2022, background): “…rate of scientiﬁc publication places a tremendous cognitive burden on researchers (Teplitskiy et al., 2022), as valuable information is now being created at a rate faster than any individual researcher can process (Price, 1963; Bornmann and Mutz, 2015; Hey and Tre-fethen, 2003; Bell et al., 2009).”
Assertiveness Training: A Forgotten Evidence-Based Treatment (2018, background): “This decrease is particularly noteworthy, as it occurred while growth rates in publication across scientific fields increased at an estimated rate of 8–9% since World War II (Bornmann & Mutz, 2015).”
Modeling plant–water interactions: an ecohydrological overview from the cell to the global scale (2016, background): “The average increasing rate of publication in scientific literature is also shown as a benchmark.(19) The MOD16”
Growth rates of modern science: a latent piecewise growth curve approach to model publication numbers from established and new literature databases (2020, background): “As the results by Bornmann and Mutz (2015) based on cited references data have shown, the negative effects of the World Wars on scientific activities are clearly visible (for the estimated parameters of the model, see Table S1 in the Supplementary Information).”
The natural selection of bad science (2016, background): “The rate at which new papers are added to the scientific literature has steadily increased in recent decades [28,29].”
PyZoBot: A Platform for Conversational Information Extraction and Synthesis from Curated Zotero Reference Libraries through Advanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2024, unknown): “PyzoBot stands as a testament to the power of technology when harmoniously blended with human intellect and creativity, opening new horizons for scientific exploration and knowledge discovery.”