Everybody knows that the scientific literature is growing. Every year, every scientific field sees more papers published than the previous year. But exactly how fast is the ecological literature growing? Can we put some numbers on it?
Here’s a quick first pass that I did last week to procrastinate on work.* I searched Web of Science Core Collection for papers published in a long list of ecology journals. It was every journal with ecol*, biodiv*, biogeogr*, limnol*, or ecosyst* in the journal title, plus American Naturalist, Global Change Biology, Ecography, Oikos, Oecologia, Population Biology, and Theoretical Population Biology. I then downloaded the data for number of papers published per year in those journals.
That’s obviously not a complete or perfect list of ecology papers. It omits ecology journals that aren’t in English. It includes at least one journal that’s not an ecology journal (Ecological Economics). It omits the many ecology papers published in general biology and general science journals. It includes a few papers in ecology journals that aren’t ecology papers (e.g., the annual editorials by many journal EiCs, summarizing how many papers the journal handled the previous year). And it omits a number of ecology journals I have since realized I forgot (e.g., Ecosphere, American Midland Naturalist, Biotropica, Conservation Biology, etc.–sorry!) I strongly suspect that it’s the omissions that loom largest, so that the data I’m about to show you underestimate the growth rate of the ecological literature.
The growth rate of ecology papers over time is well described by an exponential curve with an annual growth rate of 5.7%:
It’s interesting to think about why the data should be so well-described by an exponential curve with a constant annual growth rate of 5.7%. I mean, the global annual human population growth rate has been well under 2% for decades, and has been slowing down for decades. Inflation-adjusted funding for ecological research, from all sources, hasn’t increased 5.7% annually for the last several decades (has it?). The number of people publishing ecological research in English hasn’t increased 5.7% annually for the last several decades (has it?). So what’s fueling long-term exponential growth of the ecological literature at an annual rate of 5.7%? (Or >5.7%, once we allow for all the papers I omitted.)
*As I’ve said before, my blogging superpower is that I blog to procrastinate. Everybody procrastinates sometimes. But most people procrastinate by doing household chores, or watching tv, or scrolling social media, or whatever. I procrastinate by blogging, so I get blog posts out of the time I spend procrastinating. As opposed to getting a tidy house, or knowledge of Succession, or negative feelings.