Jason Priem /blog

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We all know the volume of scientific literature is growing.  I went looking for an infographic showing this, but wasn’t satisfied with what I found, so I made one, based on the publication dates of articles in MEDLINE.

I got the data by searching PubMed with the query
("[year]"[Publication Date])where [year] was each year from 1950-2009. Then I charted the results in R, and resized them in Photoshop.

The data, R code, and images  are all CC0 (public domain), and can be used wherever and for whatever you fancy.

small version of graphic

num-medline-articles-published-by-year.txt

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# setup.
pub <- read.table("path_to_data_file", header=TRUE)
par(cex=2.2) # controls the relative size of the text
mainTitle <- "MEDLINE-indexed articles\npublished per year"
 
# make the plot.
# see www.harding.edu/fmccown/r/ for a nice intro on plot options
plot(pub, main=mainTitle, ylab='', xlab='', type="l", axes=F, 
     col='red', lwd=6, ylim=c(0,1000000))
 
# label the axes
axis(1, at=seq(1950, 2010, 10), lab=seq(1950, 2010, 10))
labs <- c('','','200k','','400k','','600k','','800k','','1M')# quick and dirty labels...
axis(2, at=seq(0, 1000000, 100000), lab=labs, las=2)  # "las" makes labeles display horiz.

2 Comments

1. Peter
   Posted March 8, 2011 at 9:08 pm | Permalink

   Nice work. I was wondering what % of the growth is due to actual increase in rate/speed of scientific articles and what % is due to any expansion Medline’s indexing and abstracting efforts. Any ideas? The numbers on your chart are staggering because I was under the impression that the world’s total output of new peer-reviewed scientific articles was at the 700,000 articles per year level (one per minute). However, in the following article, 1.3M articles seem to be counted in 2006 and the rate should be growing(www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2909426/?tool=pubmed), but this is for all of peer-reviewed science, which would put clinical medicine at an unusually high %. I’m no expert, just a novice trying to get my arms around the bibliome. Feel free to contact me separately via email.

2. Johnny
   Posted September 14, 2011 at 1:53 am | Permalink

   Thanks a lot!
   Real useful information.

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