Inside Higher Ed reports on two new NSF studies showing a decline in American scientific publishing. Sort of.
What the studies found, however, was that besides the well-known decrease in the relative share of journal articles originating from the United States, there was a slowdown in absolute numbers as well. This "plateau," as the reports call it, began in the early 1990s and stands in marked contrast to at least the two previous decades' worth of American research.
The flattening of growth in science and engineering publishing -- it has "essentially remained constant since 1992," according to the first report -- remains partly a mystery. The report also asserts that there hasn't been a corresponding decrease in "resource inputs," such as funding and research staff, that might stunt the growth of American output in scholarly journals. And the plateau is seen across multiple disciplines within the sciences.
They also provide a helpful data table, and I have to say, I'm just not that alarmed.
First of all, the table talks about the growth rate of American-authored publications, which has admittedly dropped dramatically. But we're talking about annual growth, here, not absolute numbers, and look at the "before" numbers-- they show annual growth of at least 2% per year, up to almost 7% per year. There's just no way that's sustainable-- if nothing else, I can't imagine people reading the sheer number of papers that would result from extending that growth.
The growth rates across the board have dropped down to something under 1% per year, which strikes me as much more reasonable. There are two exceptions: one is "Geosciences and Astronomy," which is growing at 3% per year, and the other is Physics, which is dropping at 0.8% per year (over the period from 1992-2003). I'm not terribly surprised by either of those, though.
My sense is that there's been a real revolution in astronomy over that time, with the Hubble coming online, the various robotic missions to other planets, the development of techniques for detecting extrasolar planets, and the rise of observational cosmology (the COBE result was in 1992, remember). I'm not sure what's been going on in geological circles, but I could easily believe that the growth rate reflects a real explosion in astronomical research.
And then there's physics, which is the only field to show negative growth in the number of American-authored articles from 1992-2003. In what is apparently viewed as a total coincidence, physics is also the only field for which the rate of funding growth (adjusted for inflation) has also been negative. There's some head-scratching in the article about how the results don't seem to be strongly correlated with funding, and it's true that large funding growth doesn't correlate with large growth in the number of papers, but isn't this worth a mention? The one field whose real funding has decreased just happens to be the one field showing an actual decline in the number of papers, and that's just an accident?
Of course, if you'd like to believe that funding has nothing to do with it, I can give you a non-monetary reason why American article authorship in physics might be in decline over that period: The arXiv. The Los Alamos pre-print server started in 1991, just before the period covered by the survey, and in the time frame they studied, a great deal of activity, primarily in high-energy physics, has shifted to the arXiv, to the point where many physicists in those fields don't really bother with print journals any more. If the survey is only counting published articles (which it appears to be), then they may just be missing a lot of physics activity.
Regardless, I have a hard time seeing this as a major crisis. I mean, the scientific literature has already expanded to the point where nobody can hope to keep up with even a single field (look at the size of an issue of PRL today, compared to one from 1987), and I'm supposed to be distressed that it isn't growing faster?
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I expect the number of physics articles published to skyrocket once the LHC comes online, at least for a year or three. At least, I hope so.
Number of papers is a sad metric, anyway.
I probably couldn't pull any out right now, but I've seen quite a number of commentaries in Physics Today and the like about ballooning numbers of papers and that each paper isn't as meaningful as each paper was decades ago. A substantial fraction of this is probably typical "rose colored glasses" looking back at history, but the drive to have a huge publication list probably contributes to this.
Taking any sort of "counting" metric as the only statistic by which to raise an alarm about anything other than number counts is always dubious.
-Rob
I follow this issue occasionally from the engineering/technical side as well. I have a few observations from that end:
1) If doom is being predicted, look for the the demands for money. This is probably more applicable-- or at least more infuriating-- on the engineering side than the science side.
Few things reach out from academia to irritate me more than computer science professors whining that they're not well funded enough. Sixty years ago, computer science was virtually unknown, and universities visionary enough to have a department were few and far between. Today, the subject is taught at community colleges, and showered in money by industry, and the price of computing equipment has dropped like a stone. Shut up and give the biologists a chance.
2) "Relative" declines are often not declines at all, but are signs of growth in other segments. You have to live in a turnip truck not to realize that places like China, India, and Brazil are trying to get their acts together, leading to more papers being published there, leading to more papers being published overall.
3) Uncritical acceptance of the best cherry-picked statistics from abroad will mislead you. There was a big kerfluffle in 2005-2006 about the number of engineers China was pumping out through its educational system. Huge, staggering numbers. THat got huge play in the media I read, because it was a great way (see point 1) for engineering and technical associations at every level to demand more money.
What got much less play was a subsequent report from MIT saying, "Uh... the Chinese engineers are the equivalent of associates degrees here, or engineering technicians. This is... not so much an issue, guys."
4) It's probably not the best metric, but a better metric than papers published is papers cited. That, at least, gives some indication of the community's collective judgement of a paper's worth. It's better to publish two papers with a hundred cites than ten papers with no cites. (Unless you're up for tenure next year.)
...where many physicists in those fields don't really bother with print journals any more.
This is only true in some sense. Very few people in any field can afford not to publish their work in peer reviewed journals, it comes into evaluation at any step of the academic stream. Not surprisingly, only a handful of high energy physicists don't bother with journals any more.
What did happen though is the replacement of print journal by peer-reviewed free-access electronic journals, which are cheaper to maintain and use and therefore are less of a burden on the system. I wish more people would be aware of the subtle distinction between those and the Arxiv. Not that subtle really...
I'm not sure what's been going on in geological circles, but I could easily believe that the growth rate reflects a real explosion in astronomical research.
Not even close to being the same groups, for what it's worth.
Which is important in that one of the two groups gets a hell of a lot of oil money contributed towards their work.
agm, 'Space Science' has a strong geological component and is often found in Astronomy Departments, which is presumably the overlap.
The growth in the geosciences might be related to interest in "global warming". You might have heard of it. ;-) Geology and oceanography must have seen an increase in publication activity as a result, just as the peak productivity years for Hubble contribute on the astro side.
The plateau in physics is hardly surprising given a plateau in funding and a plateau in faculty at PhD-granting institutions. One of the surprising things I learned while putting together some info about physics jobs
http://doctorpion.blogspot.com/2007/07/physics-jobs-part-2.html
was that the AIP data show a steady decline (about 10 positions per year) in t-t jobs at PhD-granting schools through the 90s. [Note that the tables are all there but the supporting links and explanation may have to await reading Harry Potter 7.]
HEP is a tiny fraction of all of physics, but the death of the SSC certainly contributes to the slump and is indicative of changing funding priorities for physics vis-a-vis human genome, drug development, and other NIH programs.
I work as a geophysicist in the petroleum industry. The number of technical papers has increased over the past 15 years as has the number of geologists and geophysicists in the petroleum industry. Fifteen years ago, there were a large number of unemployed geoscience professionals. Today, there is almost full employment. You can view abstracts of one of the publications at www.seg.org and look at Geophysics - Online Archive.
Interesting to note that the index they used reported 519,350 articles for 2000, while Google Scholar has 865,000 indexed for that year. Scholar includes non Science and Engineering articles as well, but from brief sampling it seems that over 90% are S&E related. So it seems there's enough room to explain the plateau through shift to non-traditional sources like Arxiv (which is indexed by Scholar)