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?