It would have been very strange if I were the only one asking this question and doing some research. I'm glad to find some prior work on this, not least because it means I'm not the only one who cares.
A report on the International Conference on Fifth Generation Computer Systems in 1988, written by Jakob Nielson, refers to research by Jorg Siekmann of the University of Kaiserslauten in the then West Germany.
Nielson writes, "Siekmann reported that the number of scientific journals doubles every 15 years, the number of books in university libraries doubles every 10 years, and the number of scientific publications doubles every 5 years. The knowledge explosion has already reached a level where in chemistry it is often cheaper to conduct a possible duplication of an experiment than to search the literature to find whether the result of a previous experiment can be used." That last bit is scary--I wonder if it's still true. Let's see if we can find more about Siekmann and his research.
Google likes him--a little too much. There are 108,000 search returns on his name.
The University has some material about him: Jörg H. Siekmann is the head of several research groups working in artificial intelligence at the "Universität des Saarlandes" and at the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Saarbrücken. He is a professor in the department of computer science and a director at the DFKI. The five research groups are:
Automated Reasoning for Mathematics: OMEGA
Competence Center e-Learning
Formal Methods: VSE
Multi-Agent Systems
The IT-Security Evaluation Centre
Currently he is the chairman of the collaborative research centre "Resource-adaptive cognitive Processes" (SFB 378) funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG). He is chairman of the network of excellence on computational logic (CoLogNet), and vice president of the International Federation on Computational Logic (IFCoLog) . His main research interests are Artificial Intelligence, Automated Reasoning, Multiagent Systems and e-Learning in Mathematics.
But I can't find any more information about his statement at the conference. However, I did stumble across something quite interesting that might lead to the origin of the statement Human Knowledge Doubles Every Five Years. See next post (above).
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