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Not having anything to do with publishing papers myself I thought the 100,000+ papers submitted in 2015 sounded like a lot, until I looked into it [1] and saw t

Not having anything to do with publishing papers myself I thought the 100,000+ papers submitted in 2015 sounded like a lot, until I looked into it [1] and saw there's likely more than a million academic papers published every year. What are all those papers like? I wonder if a large proportion are the equivalent of peer-reviewed blog posts. [1] https://www.quora.com/How-many-academic-papers-are-published-each-year https://www.quora.com/How-many-academic-papers-are-published...

xamuel 11y ago
I wonder how many research professors there are in the world. Basic googling suggests there are order-of-magnitude 1000000 university faculty in the world, so a million papers is at most 1 paper per faculty member per year, which doesn't seem unreasonable. Of course, how many of those faculty are serious researchers, and how many are just instructors, is a harder question.
- dalke 11y ago
  It's not only research professors who publish. Corporate research scientists also publish, including those at Microsoft, Google, and Intel.
  - jrowley 11y ago
    Grad students publish too!
    - dalke 11y ago
      True! And undergrads. And private scholars. And .. The easy way to answer this would be to use something like Web of Knowledge to get a rough sense of the number of distinct authors.
- ajford 11y ago
  Part of it comes from the fact that a lot of institutions require continuous publication by their faculty/research staff. If you don't publish because you're focusing on a long term paper, it can look bad on you during annual review. To combat this a fair number of people will publish many times on the same developing experiment (not that this is necessarily a bad thing). Don't forget grad students and dedicated undergrads. That adds a fair bit to your existing numbers.
scholar1729 11y ago
Have you tried http://www.semanticscholar.org http://www.semanticscholar.org?

xamuel 11y ago

I wonder how many research professors there are in the world. Basic googling suggests there are order-of-magnitude 1000000 university faculty in the world, so a million papers is at most 1 paper per faculty member per year, which doesn't seem unreasonable. Of course, how many of those faculty are serious researchers, and how many are just instructors, is a harder question.

dalke 11y ago
It's not only research professors who publish. Corporate research scientists also publish, including those at Microsoft, Google, and Intel.
- jrowley 11y ago
  Grad students publish too!
  - dalke 11y ago
    True! And undergrads. And private scholars. And .. The easy way to answer this would be to use something like Web of Knowledge to get a rough sense of the number of distinct authors.
ajford 11y ago
Part of it comes from the fact that a lot of institutions require continuous publication by their faculty/research staff. If you don't publish because you're focusing on a long term paper, it can look bad on you during annual review. To combat this a fair number of people will publish many times on the same developing experiment (not that this is necessarily a bad thing). Don't forget grad students and dedicated undergrads. That adds a fair bit to your existing numbers.

scholar1729 11y ago

Have you tried http://www.semanticscholar.org http://www.semanticscholar.org?