note from stephen strauss

[Stevan Harnad]

On Wed, 15 Jun 2005, stephen strauss wrote:

> Hi Stevan::
>
> I have a couple of questions you likely know the
> answers to. Do you know how many scholarly papers are published in a
> year,

Hi Stephen,

Nice to hear from you. Using Bowkers/Ulrich's to estimate about 24,000
peer-reviewed journals, and the ISI subset to get a ball-park idea
of the average number of articles per year per journal (a but over
100, though it varies widely by field), I've been using the figure of
2.5 million articles per year.

> and what is the average output of these per researcher.

I don't have data on annual number of articles per researcher, though
it might exist. (I branch this to Alma Swan, who may have some data.)
My guess is that it varies between 2 and 10+ for a productive researcher,
with mode at around 3 or 4.)

I've also heard that the number of research universities worldwide is about
8000.

I'm also branching your query to the sigmetrics list: an expert there may
have better estimates for all of these.

>  I guess
> it is different in different disciplines, and if you knew that it would
> be delish.
>
> Stephen Strauss
>
> P.S. Do you know about the effort to include holograms in scholarly
> papers for people who need 3D views of objects?

Yes, and various forms of stereochemistry and crystallographic structures.
(A very welcome specialty advantage of the online medium, but not its
revolutionary essence!)

Cheers, Stevan