4 ms·

>There are on the order of 100 million papers [reference 2] published to date. Does anyone else feel as if this (admittedly rough) estimate is off by an order

• cnees 11mo ago
  OpenAlex has 240M. https://docs.openalex.org/api-entities/works https://docs.openalex.org/api-entities/works CORE has 431M. https://core.ac.uk/data https://core.ac.uk/data Crossref has 165M. https://www.crossref.org/blog/2025-public-data-file-now-available/ https://www.crossref.org/blog/2025-public-data-file-now-avai... These datasets are all biased towards work published in the digital age, but it's important to note that work is coming out much faster now than it used to.
  • ktallett 11mo ago
    Is that because there is a pressure to publish? As I wouldn't say we make advancements at a rate any different during the last two decades than we have over the 20 years prior to that.
  • mncharity 11mo ago
    So indeed, order 10^9 not 10^8, given the CORE at > sqrt(10)*10^8.
• rdlw 11mo ago
  If 1% of the last 10 billion people to live were academics and published on average 5 papers (many only had one, i.e. their dissertation/thesis, but a small fraction will have had dozens or hundreds), that comes to 500 million. I'm curious, do you think it's an order of magnitude too low or too high?
  • NoMoreNicksLeft 11mo ago
    I think it's too low.
• vasvir 11mo ago
  MEDLINE (health / life science) has 37M papers. IIRC the rate of publishing was superlinear thus the curve of actual publications goes faster than the quadratic function.