Policy and Complex Systems
Conclusion
The rate of production of scientific
publications appears to be continuing on an exponential growth curve 8 against the prediction of Derek de Solla Price . ( This article examines only publications , but it has been noted that scientific data ( Borgman , Wallis , and Enyedy 2007 ) and e-Science ( Hey and Trefethen 2005 ) are also growing phenomena , as well .) The growth of scientific publications has many possible causes , but the system itself appears to be operating efficiently . The networked nature of global science ( Wagner and Leydesdorff 2005 ), the expansion of source materials and venues , the expansion of the practice of science to new places , the application of science to new problems ( such as climate change ), and the rise of China as a scientific power all may be contributing to the very rapid growth in output , increasing the complexity of the system .
The model constructed for this article suggests that scientific output may continue to grow exponentially . Many of the abstracting databases such as Web of Science ( SCIE ) are making an effort to grow their indexing services with the growth in the number of both journal titles and articles , but even so , the database used here contains only a portion of all publications ( Wagner and Wong 2011 ). ( Many of these non-source publications are in national languages and therefore remain difficult for us to access , but the materials are part of the corpus of science and can be expected to garner increasing attention over time .) Moreover , open access journals and other types of venues on the Internet continue to proliferate , shifting the face of scientific publishing to meet the needs of practitioners and users as well as the capacity of the tools to deliver information . The proliferation of sources contributes to the growth trend , and also makes it more difficult to count the outputs , but we can assume that these outputs are part of the complex system of communications of science .
Others have noted the challenge to public policy of the problems of counting scientific output for national comparisons :
It is problematic that SCI has been used and is still used as the dominant source forscience indicators based on publication and citation numbers . SCI has nearly been in a monopoly situation . This monopoly is now being challenged by the new publication channels and by new sources for publication and citation counting . It is also a serious problem because a substantial amount of scientometric work and of R & D statistics has been done using a database which year for year has covered a smaller part of the scientific literature . ( Larsen and Von Ins 2010 , 601 )
Derek de Solla Price presented the saturation hypothesis in part because exponential growth does not continue unchecked for long periods of time without one of several things happening : the physical limitations of its surroundings must change so as not to restrict growth , or the carrying capacity of the system must shift to absorb larger numbers . Both of these phenomena may be occurring . With regard to the Internet , the carrying capacity of the system has shifted to enable the absorption of new material . The rate of growth within disciplines may follow the Price ’ s saturation curve while the rate of growth as a whole remains exponential for the near future , and this possibility needs to be tested in future research .
Price ’ s intuition about the limits of the system in a state of exponential
8
The rate of growth may not be constant ; it is not possible to measure the entire system . 124