Derek J. de Solla Price, writing in 1965 in Science, gives us a benchmark. In a paper entitled Networks of Scientific Papers, (PDF) exploring the links between citations and references, de Solla Price writes:
"We can calculate roughly that, since the body of world literature has been growing exponentially for a few centuries and probably will continue at its present rate of growth of about 7 percent per annum, there will be 7 new papers each year for every 100 previously published papers in a given field." A footnote refers to his 1963 book, Little Science, Big Science, published by Columbia University Press.
So, we return to the Rule of 72 website to find that a 7% growth rate would result in the doubling of scientific publications every 10.3 years.
Not good news, but that was in 1965. Is there more recent information?
Yes, and its worse news. The National Science Foundation published a chart showing growth in scientific and technical papers for selected countries. It's here--click on the image to see a readable version.
For the OECD, it shows very slow growth (1.5%) between 1987-1994, and no growth (0.1%) from 1995-1999.
This is really bad news. The higher growth rate doubles in 48 years, the lower growth rate in 720 years. I hope we've been making up for lost time since 1999...
One indication why this may have happened is reduced government funding for research and development. The graph above comes from a 2002 report called Science and Engineering Indicators. It writes, "The decline in the share of government funds for R&D is a key trend common to all major industrial nations and many other OECD countries. In the mid-1980s, these nations derived an average of 45 percent of their R&D funds from government sources; by 1998, this figure had fallen to less than one-third. The relative retrenchment reflects the broad growth of industrial R&D, reductions in defense R&D in some key nations, and broader economic and spending constraints on governments. As a consequence, government funding for industrial R&D performance also fell, averaging 23 percent in 1983 but only 10 percent in 1998 for OECD as a whole."
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