Re: growth of the discipline

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John Alroy <jack@homebrew.geo.Arizona.EDU> wrote:

[Summary of literature per year for North American mammals]

|3) There is _definitely_ a flattening in the curve, and I do not think  
|it's merely due to my not keeping up with recent literature. The data  
|start to go flat in 1984-86, which is a decade ago, and it should take  
|far less than ten years for obscure North American references to land on  
|my desk. Furthermore, the rate of growth doesn't merely slow - there's  
|_no_ growth after this point. If you project the 7.2% growth rate from |
|1981-83's 158 references, there should be 363 references in 1993-96. The  
|data are completely incompatible with a rate of growth that fast. I'm  
|fairly confident about concluding from these data that the field (or at  
|least the mammal paleo sub-sub-field) has reached the limits of its  
|growth, and started doing so in the early 1980's. Has the ghost of Ronald  
|Reagan come back to haunt us? Comments, anyone?

	I have done effectively the same thing for palynological  
literature, and also for the number of (currently valid) species per year.   
Many of the same trends are present (e.g., the WWII "blip").  As for the  
most recent data, yes, there is a definite flattening of the trend in the  
1980s, and in the last 2 or 3 years, a decline.  With the data set I had,  
I could not be sure if this was due to the lag entering new citations into  
the database, or if it is real.  I suspect more and more that the  
flattening, at least, is real.  For the species, this isn't necessarily  
bad (it may be reaching saturation, or, thank goodness, people may be more  
careful defining new species), but for the total number of publications,  
it is an ominous trend.  It will be interesting to see if it holds up in  
the next few years, or if the dataset fills in with time.



	-Andrew
	macrae@geo.ucalgary.ca
	home page: "http://geo.ucalgary.ca/~macrae/current_projects.html";