# Growth rates of modern science: A latent piecewise growth curve approach to model publication numbers from established and new literature databases

**Authors:** Lutz Bornmann, Robin Haunschild, Ruediger Mutz  
**arXiv:** [2012.07675](https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.07675)  
**Date:** 2020-12-14  
**Summary page:** https://www.summarizepaper.com/en/paper/2012.07675v3/

## Key points

- Study focuses on growth of science in the field of science studies
- Researchers used Dimensions, Microsoft Academic, Web of Science, and Scopus databases for analysis
- Overall growth rate of science is 4.10% with a doubling time of 17.3 years
- Model with five segments fits publication data best, indicating different growth rates related to economic and political developments
- Examined scientific growth in Physical and Technical Sciences, as well as Life Sciences
- Slight differences in growth rates between these fields
- Scientific growth in the UK was higher than economic growth
- Various methods used to collect publication data for each database (Scopus, Microsoft Academic)
- Insights into how economic and political developments influence scientific progress over time

## Summary

This study focuses on the growth of science in the field of science studies. The researchers utilized two new bibliographic databases, Dimensions from Digital Science and Microsoft Academic, along with two established databases, Web of Science from Clarivate Analytics and Scopus from Elsevier, to analyze scientific growth processes from the beginning of the modern science system until today. By estimating regression models that included publication counts from all four databases, the researchers found that the overall growth rate of science amounts to 4.10% with a doubling time of 17.3 years. They also discovered that a model with five segments fits the publication data best, indicating different growth rates related to economic and political developments such as industrialization and the Second World War. Furthermore, this study examined scientific growth in two broad fields: Physical and Technical Sciences, as well as Life Sciences. The comparison between these fields revealed only slight differences in their growth rates. Additionally, the researchers analyzed the relationship between scientific and economic growth in the UK and found that while both rates were high, economic growth was slightly lower than scientific growth. To conduct their analysis, the researchers collected publication data using various methods for each database. For Scopus they used its advanced search function to download indexed papers per year without any restrictions on document types; broad subject categories were defined based on Scopus subject areas. Microsoft Academic was accessed through its search interface and bulk data access via Azure platform; a snapshot containing bibliographic information for over 212 million publications dating back to 1800 was downloaded. This study provides valuable insights into how different factors such as economic and political developments can influence scientific progress by examining scientific growth processes over time using multiple databases.