The Price of Big Science
researchers operating largely within academic institutions . Researchers span institutional boundaries to self-organize into disciplines . Disciplinary organization is stabilized within journals reporting on activities within the field . Funding agencies also largely organize along disciplinary lines . Funding is based upon past publication performance and excellence as measured by citations to previous work in high impact journals .
Various attempts have been made to measure the scope and trajectory of scientific publishing , although not in ways that reveal systemic features . The literature on the growth of science has counted the number of articles and the proliferation of journals and other venues ( such as online journals ) where science is published . The rise of new venues of publication — such as arXiv , the Public Library of Science ( PLoS ), and Scientific Commons — complicates the counting and categorization processes . On the one hand , it shows vitality within scientific research , and on the other , it challenges those policymakers who rely on databases such as Web of Science and Scopus , which , for all their strengths , are limited in their ability to represent the scope of scientific output ( Larsen and Von Ins 2010 ; Stevan Harnad 1997 ; Christine Borgman , Wallis , and Enyedy 2007 ). The databases are highly skewed toward reporting elite science rather than all of the scientific outputs .
Price ’ s hypothesis of growth of scientific knowledge
The rapid growth of science is not
new : even in the seventeenth century , scholars bemoaned the problem of keeping up with the rush of publications . In 1613 , Barnaby Rich wrote : “ One of the diseases of this age is the multiplicity of books ! They doth so overcharge the world that it is not able to digest the abundance of idle matter that is every day hatched and brought forth into the world .” In an attempt to characterize contemporary science , most scholars turn to the seminal work of Derek de Solla Price , who began his studies of science in the early 1960s . In this case , we will test Price ’ s hypothesis — tied to the “ Big Science ” model — of the saturation point of scientific publishing . In 1961 , Price pointed out that scientific output had been growing at an exponential rate for three centuries . He further noted that the laws of physics would suggest that nothing can continue to grow indefinitely along an exponential growth curve . With this in mind , Price proposed a saturation point , shown in Figure 1 , where he hypothesized that the growth trend of scientific publication would follow an s-curve in that knowledge would reach a saturation point . He anticipated that this point would occur within a generation from his writing ( which would be contemporaneous with this article ) and then would level off . The growth of scientific knowledge would reach a point where its growth would shift from exponential to a steady state of production .
To support his argument , Price analyzed the total number of papers published in scientific fields since 1740 . Based on the historical trend of the published papers , the finite nature of growth , and the known numbers at the time of calculation , Price expected that science would reach a point where exponential growth was no longer possible . Price ’ s thesis and associated literature has been well reviewed by many scholars , including Jinha ( 2010 ), Lariviere , Archambault , and Gingras ( 2008 ) and Fernandez-Cano , Torralbo , and Vallejo ( 2004 ). Lariviere , Archambault , and Gingras ( 2008 ) reviewed the literature on the lifecycle of scientific literature . They calculated Price ’ s Index ( 1986 ) of knowledge obsolescence for
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