Growth of science is a prevalent issue in science of science studies. In recent years, two new bibliographic databases have been introduced which can be used to study growth processes in science from centuries back: Dimensions from Digital Science and Microsoft Academic. In this study, we used publication data from these new databases and added publication data from two established databases (Web of Science from Clarivate Analytics and Scopus from Elsevier) to investigate scientific growth processes from the beginning of the modern science system until today. We estimated regression models that included simultaneously the publication counts from the four databases. The results of the unrestricted growth of science calculations show that the overall growth rate amounts to 4.10% with a doubling time of 17.3 years. As the comparison of various segmented regression models in the current study revealed, the model with five segments fits the publication data best. We demonstrated that these segments with different growth rates can be interpreted very well, since they are related to either phases of economic (e.g., industrialization) and / or political developments (e.g., Second World War). In this study, we additionally analyzed scientific growth in two broad fields (Physical and Technical Sciences as well as Life Sciences) and the relationship of scientific and economic growth in UK. The comparison between the two fields revealed only slight differences. The comparison of the British economic and scientific growth rates showed that the economic growth rate is slightly lower than the scientific growth rate.
翻译:科学增长是科学研究科学的一个普遍问题。近年来,我们引入了两个新的书目数据库,可以用来研究几个世纪前的科学增长过程:数字科学和微软学术的层面。在本研究中,我们使用这些新数据库的出版数据,并从两个已建立的数据库(Clarivate Analytics科学网和Elsevier的Scopus科学网)增加出版物数据,以调查从现代科学系统开始到今天的科学增长过程。我们估计了包含四个数据库出版数字的回归模型。科学的无限制增长结果表明,总体增长率达到4.10 %, 翻了一番,17.3年。通过对当前研究中各种分层回归模型的比较,五个部分最适合出版数据。我们证明,这些增长率不同的部分可以很好地加以解释,因为它们与经济(例如工业化)和/或政治发展(例如第二次世界大战)两个阶段同时进行。在这个研究中,我们进一步分析了两个广泛的科学增长领域(即物理学和科技增长速度之间的细微差距)的科学增长和英国经济增长率。我们进一步分析了两个领域的科学增长率。