The Price of Big Science
100 years of publications in Web of Science based on citations . They show that even with the rapid increase in output , knowledge is not becoming obsolete more rapidly . Moreover , the average age of cited literature has held fairly stable at eight years for nearly 50 years ( p . 295 ). They calculate Price ’ s Index ( 1963 ) of obsolescence and found that the Internet may be enabling greater access to older literature , which in turn is being cited . They infer that this access may be slowing the rate of obsolescence .
Similarly , Jinha ( 2010 ) found that scientific output has kept growing exponentially from the time that Price conducted his calculations . Jinha ( 2010 ) investigated annual global research output patterns based on the amount of accumulated scientific articles between 1726 and 2009 and found that the growth of publications at the article level is growing along the pure exponential growth curve in Price ’ s model in Figure 1 , not along Price ’ s saturation curve 1 ( see appendix ). Table 1 shows supporting data .
As Price himself noted in later works ( 1986 ), electronic formats and storage capabilities have presented to science the enormous potential to manage and develop databases in formats that did not exist when he first proposed the saturation hypothesis . The advent of the Internet provides the ability to create new electronic journals and new forms of data storage . Whether directly related to the Internet or to other dynamics or some combination in between , scientific knowledge in terms of articles as well as venues ( journals and online sites ) is growing at a significant rate without having reached Price ’ s anticipated saturation point . Indeed , Larsen and Von Ins ( 2010 ) 2 find that traditional scientific publishing ( publication in peer-reviewed journals ) has not given way to online publishing , and is still increasing , although with some notable differences between fields in growth rates .
Why is scientific publishing not “ saturated ”?
We explored the question of why
scientific knowledge has not reached the saturation point Price anticipated . Perhaps the most obvious reason is the emergence of electronic storage and diffusion technologies . In 1960 , paper libraries imposed physical constraints that limited the ability of scientists to access and build upon earlier work . These limitations have been overcome or at least mitigated 3 with the advent of digital abstracting and publishing , including the creation of online resources and the rise of open access journals ; the access to archives of formerly unpublished , primary source materials now available online ; and massive electronic storage capacity ( with anticipated access to full text still somewhat limited ). Moreover , it would not have been obvious to Price that , by the twenty-first century , developing countries would rapidly join the ranks of scientific research , and further , that their researchers would seek publication outlets at the same rate as those in advanced countries ( Wagner and Wong , 2011 ).
1
Among those scholars who have tried to count the numbers of articles and journals being published in one year or accumulative over time , the estimates range fairly widely depending upon the assumptions about the
boundaries of scientific scholarship , as well as the database from which the analysts draw .
2
Larsen and Von Ins analyzed available data between 1907 and 2007 from a number of literature databases , including Science Citation Index ( SCI ) and Social Sciences Citation Index ( SSCI ).
3
Some say that the continuing practice of having scientific articles behind the ‘ walls ’ of subscription-based journals limits access for many potential readers , see Harnad ( 2007 ).
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