NASA and the Smithsonian Institute maintain a database called the Astrophysics Data System. Harvard University is kind enough to host it here. Available to you and I is an abstracting service which will return brief descriptions of articles found by keyword searches. You see where I'm going here?
For a description of coverage and limitations of the database, click here. Then, let's have some fun.
A search for the word Mars in titles and abstracts performed on April 21 2007 returned 20,978 results. Let's pretend for the sake of argument that this represents all human knowledge ever gained about Mars. (This may be as close to the truth as we will ever get on this weblog when searching for information about fields of study--but it is obviously not true, so take it with a grain of salt.)
What is the CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) in publications? Well, if we were really strict, we would measure from the date of the first document, which is... 1644. That would give us a CAGR of 2.32% and we would all get very depressed. But a more realistic starting point would be 1830, when regular publications started. This would remove only 10 documents from our total, and would yield a CAGR of 5.78%. That's much better, but far short of doubling every five years. (At that rate, human knowledge about Mars would double every 12.34 years.) Nonetheless, half of the documents in the database have been published since 1993. (Hey--that doubled in 14 years... is the rate of doubling slowing down?)
Just the metadata I got from the site is fascinating, and I'll be referring to it later, looking for short term bursts and lags (and wondering if Mars' distance from the Earth is one of the causes, for example). But here's some interesting information.
The most recent, published in April 2007, is titled "Subsurface Radar Sounding of the South Polar Layered Deposits of Mars and written by Plaut, Jeffrey J.; Picardi, Giovanni; Safaeinili, Ali; Ivanov, Anton B.; Milkovich, Sarah M.; Cicchetti, Andrea; Kofman, Wlodek; Mouginot, Jérémie; Farrell, William M.; Phillips, Roger J.; and 14 coauthors
Document #3001 is titled "Review of the trajectory and atmospheric structure reconstruction for Mars Pathfinder", written by Withers, Paul; Towner, Martin; Hathi, Brijen; Zarnecki, John
Document #6001 is titled "History and perspectives of scientific ballooning," by Frank Lefevre. Hmm. Well, document #6002 is "Stability and evolution of the climate system of Mars," written in 2001 by Stability and evolution of the climate system of Mars
Document #9001 is titled "Mobilization of dust on the Mars surface by the impact of small cosmic bodies," written in 1997 by Rybakov, V. A.; Nemtchinov, I. V.; Shuvalov, V. V.; Artemiev, V. I.; Medveduk, S. A.
Document #12001 is titled "Dry Carbonate Formation on Mars: A Plausible Sink for an Early Dense CO2 Atmosphere?", written in 1990 by Stephens, S. K.; Stevenson, D. J.
Document #15001 is titled "Stratigraphic relationships within Martian polar CAP deposits" written in 1982 by Howard, A. D.; Cutts, J. A.; Blasius, K. R.
Document #18001 is titled "The major Martian dust storms of 1971 and 1973" written in 1974 by Martin, L. J.
The very first document, written in 1644 by Grandami, Jacques, is titled "Nova demonstratio immobilitatis terrae petita EX virtvte magnetica."
If that's a little dense for you, the second, written in 1672 by Flamstead, John, is "An Extract of Mr. Flamstead's Letter Written to the Publisher from Derby Novemb. 16. 1672. Concerning the Appulses, by Him Calculated for A. 1673. of the Moon, and the Other Planets to Fixed Stars; Together with an Observation of the Planet Mars, Made by the Same"
Comments