I would like to ask a counting question since all of this is based on good counting and a great deal of faith is placed on the the counters. Even the US census knows the issues with doing this and resorts to capture/recapture methods to get things right.
Counting papers should be rather straightforward since there are databases which are primarily populated manually mostly by the authors themselves. However, counting unique authors is not so straightforward; clustering same author mentions is nontrivial and just counting each mention leads to terribly inaccurate results. How does the UN or anyone disambiguate authors, such as the John Smith at Harvard from the John Smith at Berkeley or, more interestingly, from the H. Chen at many places? Is this a manual or an automatic method? Manual methods do not scale (look at DBLP) and have many errors - see PubMed. Do you know how many different "you's" there are in health record or credit databases; you would be surprised. As for automatic methods, the literature is rife with results. Disambiguation algorithms are notoriously temperamental and, depending on the parameters, can lead to over- or under- counting by factors up to an order of magnitude. Best regards, Lee Giles On 1/3/12 9:59 AM, Arif Jinha wrote: Arthur, Great work. Just trying to save you some time. Here's what I found after worki ng on it for about 2 years. - # of researchers in the world is reported by UN data in the Science Report. - That figure directly relates to the number of journal titles which relates dir ectly to the number of articles, and the growth rates of articles and researcher s are 1:1. So, even if you're not interested in the number of annual articles p ublished, it's important to note as a check on data and possibly a challenge to the evidence thus far. - There are more researchers than annual articles - about 6 to 7. Again, a chec k on data or a challenge. In the absence of any undertaking of reasonable time and expense to count resear chers better than the UN, I've relied on that data not for great precision but b ecause of the logical and empirical support for the internal consistency of the relationships (the self-organizing system of scholarly communication). I'm very confident in the precision of some estimates and growth rates for artic les and not others, those done by Mabe (1 million annual articles in 2000, 3.4% growth of journals over 3 centuries and variability in Little Science, Big Scien ce and Disillusionment periods) Tenopir and King (similar data in the late 1990s ) and Bjork. The 2.5 million articles frequently cited by Harnad is way off bec ause they failed to take into account the difference in article averages - they used the article average from ISI and the number of titles from Ulrich's. There is no excuse for that. The other estimates that are way off occur before the to ols were available to get the precision needed and those are older estimtes. In addition, Bjork's work continues to cite the 3.4% average annual growth of ac tive journals, whereas I have noted a spike in article and journal output since 2000 which is important to note. The variations in article and journal growth a re what defines Little Science (before WWII), Big Science (after WWII), Disillus ionment (1970s to 2000) periods. Since the current growth rate is minimally 4.5% , we currently see a) a reversal of disllusionment, b) the highest variation in history, and c) the highest annual increase in production. Moreover, we see a m assive 10% drop in the share to the West (NA, Europe, Australia and New Zealand) , as a result of globalization. We can also see from the data minimally 20% of articles being OA now, and the current growth rate (last 5 yrs) pointing towards 50% in the next 20 years. So, I have named 2 new periods after Disillusionment - Global Science (2000 to current) and Open Science (current to future). Here are my frustrations with this research, it is rooted in the ancient researc h paradigms of the 20th century, which I myself had to wade through. It lacks R EFLEXIVITY, and is hopelessly academic. Academia is hopelessly unimaginative. You cannot determine the future of OA by the trend alone, logically if the share of OA is already significant and growing rapidly, this alters the market, and p uts pressure on publishers to react. What will happen is that as the OA share i ncreases, more journals will convert to OA, and more new journals will start OA. A quick look into Urlich's tells me that the increase in new OA journals is muc h higher than the current growth rate of Gold OA articles. Secondly, the growth of mandates is spectacular, but the effect takes 2 years to manifest so we are only going to start to see that in the next decade. That means an acceleration of the trends that I've pointed out is likely, begging the question as to who in their right mind would publish a Toll Access journal in the year 2030, to a glo bal audience who will see Toll Access as a dinosaur? Major publishers, as we've seen, have started OA brands and this will continue u ntil a major publisher converts their entire product line to OA. That publisher will be loved because they will have a useable website, and the others will sta rt to look even more awful. You cannot determine the future either by the behaviour of current researchers, since we are in the midst of a vast demographic shift from a research world domi nated by Western baby boomers who are retiring or will retire in the next 20 yea rs. You should determine the future of OA by the behavior of future researchers who reflected the boom in the global youth population, and grew up in digital c ulture. Pay attention to students. The goals of OA create this change, so you have a reflexive effect particularly when researchers are transparently advocates of OA (which is better than attempt ing a facade of neutrality impossible for the researcher whose choices we are co ncerned with). The more you succeed in advocating OA, the more you re-arrange a nd accelerate the data you're studying. But no one is talking to the students. Following my research, I decided to register a new publising firm and I'm actual ly much more focused at the moment on creative arts and culture - so I'm using w hat I call an Open Creative Commercial business model. I plan to publish schola rly communication going forward, though I'm not satisfied by the 'article' as a format since this was designed for print. When we publish in print, there will be articles but they will have to justify their production value by being both s ound scholarship and nice to read. Most journal articles are awful reads. My thesis is not that nice to read because my university requires me to confine myself to 20th century conventions. I apologize for this since you have decided to read it. What I will do is put together a web presentation of the thesis, w hen I have recovered from academia. I'm satisfied that the data shows that the research world is changing, and I can't understand why OA advocates pay not atte ntion to students, particularly grad students since it is their culture and atti tudes which will determine their legacy and the future of OA. OA should pay att ention to and encourage students, and students know more about how to use the we b than their professors. There are several reasons why students are Occupying campuses, and tuition is on ly one problem. Respect is the mai problem. It is like the 'Bread and Roses' s trike, we want the money problem to be solved, but we want respect more than any thing. There is the lack of respect for students' at universities, particularly at the biggest ones in the North/West, which is characterized by a culture of research entitlement. That is to say, profs generally chase research money and neglect t heir students, adminstrators direct funds to a massive, bureaucratic institution al structure and the value and quality of education does not keep pace with soci al change. Students encounter outdated lessons, teaching which does not observe pedagogical knowledge, grading which discourages innovation, high debt load, and the parochial tradition of bullying students with criticism. The criticism is largely habitual by now, since profs do not have the time to constructively assi st 100s of students in their classes. Profs know and understand that the institutions are broken, but they have zero t ime to address problems. The system of tenure puts forward the false notions of 'academic freedom' as if it were a carrot, whereas all it is is job security. Thus, their days are spent chasing this carrot, and carrying the heavy workload of dealing with 20th century administration. They are time-poor They do this f or the money. Academic freedom cannot be granted, it is inherent. I learned that in high scho ol when I cut class to learn about the world. All the best critical young think ers are fed up with a generation that has led us to crisis, failure, climate cha nge, war, a university climate which does not tolerate the spirituality or mysti cism that informs arts and culture, and that used to infuse intellect with brill iance. In the Muslim world, I think we understand that the great towering intel lects of history were all mystics. Academia and in particular social sciences, holds giant cultural prejudices about the nature of reality, all of which were rejected by modern physics 50 years ago. University today is oppression by debt and drudgery and old white folks who feel g guilty about global decline. This will be the case until it is occupied by th e love of wisdom again. Access to scholarship and Open Science marks the end of exclusivity to scholarship reserved for elites who are members of rich institut ions, and ends the cultural hegemony of accreditated knowledge. Tomorrow's researchers are going to take knowledge into vast new dimensions of i ntegrated understanding together with the need to raise children in a world that one must admit is schizoprhenic, bipolar and personality-disordered! It is chao tic and it can only be tolerated by a student who becomes a Master, who grounds themselves in enlightenment - intellectual, spiritual, mystical and devotional. My child's studies in Sufism will be as important as their studies in maths. Th ere is no university today that understands any of this. Because the OA trend is irreversible and people do not require nor reasonably sh ould place trust in peer-review anymore, all of the topics we are now interested in quickly fade, and we become interested in the action of sharing knowledge an d being their own filter, doing it rather than letting institutions do it. It w ould be unwise for today's university teachers to place great emphasis on publis hing in journals anyway, but it would be wise for them to teach their students h ow to be leaders in contemporary thought, how to navigate truth and reality, and to be informationally wise, and to be fearless about the Openness paradigm - sh are your work! For me it's like the Blues Brothers - 'I'm on a mission from God' . lol. Now that I've finished my MA, I don't have to conform anymore and I can be mysel f again - mystic-philosopher-entrepreneur-occupier. There is a lot of bitternes s I need to transform into beauty, which is why I Occupy myself with the Creativ e Arts at the moment. Poetry, literature, music, visual art, photography, creati ve capitalism and mutual aid. This was dashed off quickly, and I really ought t o be on my zafu doing anapasati (that's Buddhist for 'sitting around'). Do you think, though, that there will ever space in the future for the Bohemian at univ ersity - the Alan Watts type? I hope so. Otherwise, you'll just say to people ' I got this strange letter from this student who is probably mentally ill or on d rugs'. Ugggh. That is the Brave New World we are in. If this stuff is less fun and interesting to read than my thesis, I've lost you! I wish you greatness in life, the depth of being human, and a good death. 'I believe that unconditional love and unarmed truth will have the final say in reality' - MLK. all the best, Arif yo ----- Original Message ----- From: Arthur Sale To: 'Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)' Sent: Monday, January 02, 2012 11:43 PM Subject: [GOAL] Re: How many researchers are there? Thank you Arif. I have read the article this afternoon (3 January) and will d ownload and look through your thesis asap. However I feel compelled to re-emphasize to the list that I am not looking for an estimate of how many articles are published annually, or ever. The first of those pieces of data is useful for estimating what I really want to know: how ma ny active researchers are employed in year y? Particularly 2011. Of course, it w ill be useful to have article counts by discipline, however rough, because publi cation practices differ widely between disciplines. A publication in some discip lines is worth far less than in others, the number of authors/article differs wi dely, and journal prestige varies at least as much. There are many other confusing factors in estimates based on article productio n rates which I touched on in my reply to Stevan Harnad, not least of which is t he frequency of publication of equally highly respected researchers. Some publis h rarely (say once every three years), others produce multiple articles per year . There are distributions in all these things which we should understand. If I m ention just one, the huge disparity between articles/title in ISI and non-ISI jo urnals listed in your article (111 vs 26, from Bjork et al) must give anyone cau se to reflect! That's over 4:1, too big to gloss over. I know of course that I cannot determine exactly the number of researchers in the world, any more than anyone else can determine exactly how many articles wer e written or published. As an engineer in a previous career, absolute precision in these matters is not required, rather sufficient confidence that we are in t he right ballpark. Anyway, thank you very much for your help and links, which I greatly appreciate. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Arif Jinha Sent: Tuesday, 3 January 2012 5:26 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: How many researchers are there? Arthur, You're not going to be able to determine the exact number of researchers in th e world and you will have to make good estimates. But there are direct relations hips between the number of researchers, the number of articles published annuall y and the number of active peer-reviewed journals. Good sources for methodology are my thesis - http://arif.jinhabrothers.com/sites/arif.jinhabrothers.com/files /aj.pdf (defended and submitted this fall) - Article 50 million - http://www.mendeley.com/research/article-50-million-est imate-number-scholarly-articles-existence-6/ Methods and data are based chiefly on: Bjork et al's studies on OA share growth 2006 to current Mabe and Amin, Tenopir and King - works 1990s to early 2000s Derek De Sallo Price - 1960s - the 'father of scientometrics. - you can get the number of article from Bjork's methods and data and mine. - you can get the number of researchers from UN data but there is ratio of res earchers to publishing researchers, and publishing researchers publish an averag e of 1 article per year, so if you can determine good estimate for that ratio yo u are on your way. You have good data on growth rates of researchers, articles a nd journals, but growth rates have increased dramatically since 2000 as demonstr ated in my thesis. It got a bit complex and I tried to sort it best I could in my thesis. all the best, Arif ----- Original Message ----- From: Arthur Sale To: 'Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)' Sent: Saturday, December 31, 2011 6:25 PM Subject: [GOAL] How many researchers are there? I am trying to get a rough estimate of the number of active researchers in t he world. Unfortunately all the estimates seem to be as rough as the famous Drak e equation for calculating the number of technological civilizations in the univ erse: in other words all the factors are extremely fuzzy. I seek your help. My interest is that this is the number of people who need to adopt OA for us to hav e 100% OA. (Actually, we will approach that sooner, as the average publication h as more than one author and we need only one to make it OA. To share some thinking, let me take Australia. In 2011 it had 35 universitie s and 29,226 academic staff with a PhD. Let me assume that this is the number of research active staff. The average per institution is 835, and this spans big u niversities down to small ones. Australia produces according to the OECD 2.5% of the world's research, so let's estimate the number of active researchers in the world (taking Australia as 'typical' of researchers) as 29226 / 0.025 = 1,169,0 40 researchers in universities. Note that I have not counted non-university rese arch organizations (they'll make a small difference) nor PhD students (there is usually a supervisor listed in the author list of any publication they produce). Let's take another tack. I have read the number of 10,000 research universit ies in the world bandied about. Let's regard 'research university' as equal to ' PhD-granting university'. If each of them have 1,000 research active staff on av erage, then that implies 10000 x 1000 = 10,000,000 researchers. That narrows the estimate, rough as it is, to 1.1M < no of researchers < 10M I can live with this, as it is only one power of ten (order of magnitude) be tween the two bounds. The upper limit is around 0.2% of the world's population. Another tactic is to try to estimate the number of people whose name appeare d in an author list in the last decade. Disambiguation of names rears its ugly h ead. This will also include many non-researchers in big labs, some of them will be dead, and there will be new researchers who have just not yet published, but I am looking for ball-park figures, not pinpoint accuracy. I haven't done this w ork yet. Can we do better than these estimates, in the face of different national sty les? It is even difficult to get one number for PhD granting universities in th e US, and as for India and China @$#! Arthur Sale University of Tasmania, Australia ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal [ Part 2: "Attached Text" ] _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
