Research publishing: a 25-year view using Dimensions



Hello fellow journalologists,

The volume of published research articles has grown rapidly over the past 25 years. I’ve been investigating what might have caused the increase and today I want to share my findings with you, in the form of a video.

The video is split into two halves.

The first section (22 minutes viewing time) talks you through the impact on article volumes of (1) Covid, (2) the rise of China, (3) the transition to open access, and (4) the possible effect of paper mills. I also show which subject areas grew the most over the past decade.

The second section (14 minutes viewing time) explains how I used Dimensions (Digital Science) to do the analysis.

Dimensions kindly sponsored this video, but I had full editorial control over the presentation. I’d like to thank Eric Schares, a librarian at Iowa State University, for providing invaluable feedback on an early version of these slides. Needless to say, any errors are my own.

Click the play button below to watch the video on the Digital Science YouTube channel.

video preview

I hope you find the video to be useful and interesting. Please leave a comment on YouTube if you have any questions about the data that I present here or about how I used Dimensions to create the graphs.

Until next time,

James

113 Cherry St #92768, Seattle, WA 98104-2205
Unsubscribe · Preferences

Journalology

The Journalology newsletter helps editors and publishing professionals keep up to date with scholarly publishing, and guides them on how to build influential scholarly journals.

Read more from Journalology

Subscribe to newsletter Hello fellow journalologists, Normal service returns this week, with a plethora of news, opinion and journal articles for your delectation. Share and enjoy. A coaching testimonial from an Editor-in-Chief I can recommend the coaching program without reservation. It’s been invaluable to be able to discuss the many issues that come up for editors. James is not only insightful but also well-organized so that the coaching is a great investment. Professor Kathryn Phillips...

Subscribe to newsletter Hello fellow journalologists, There’s two weeks’ worth of news to catch up on, as I was on vacation with my family over Easter. So I’ve adopted the same format as the previous issue, primarily to make this newsletter as concise as possible. As before, the text that follows has been pasted from news sources and is not my own. I’ve mixed in a few opinion pieces that I enjoyed and grouped similar topics (research integrity, AI etc.) together. But first, I hope you’ll...

Subscribe to newsletter Hello fellow journalologists, This week’s newsletter is presented in a slightly different format. I’ve been very busy with work and personal commitments and haven’t had the time to do a ’normal’ newsletter. What follows are the title and a brief excerpt from some of the stories that I’ve read over the past few weeks. None of the text was written by me. Hopefully it will help you to get a quick overview of what’s happened in scholarly publishing recently. News Update...