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

Understand

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.