Hello coffmanfyi,
and thank you for your acceptance of an answer that is less than you
hoped for originally.
The person who has looked at the growth of the journal literature most
fully is Derek de Solla Price, who was most active in the mid-1970s.
Although he looked specifically at the literature of science, I
believe his conclusions are valid for journal publishing as a whole.
His book “Little science, big science . . . and beyond” New York:
Columbia University Press, 1986 (update of his 1975 book “Little
science, big science”) is well worth reading. He characterised the
growth in scientific output as being exponential, and predicted that
there would eventually be a crisis when this growth could no longer be
sustained.
“Price estimated that starting from 1750, when there were 10
scientific periodicals, the number of such periodicals has increased
by a power of 10 every half century, which has lead to a doubling
every 15 years. Taking a longer view, he calculated that this
corresponded to a factor of 1,000 in a century and a half and of
1,000,000 since the mid-seventeenth century.”
“Price might have overestimated the growth in the number of scientific
journals, because he did not exclude discontinued serials…
Nevertheless, his estimates take on a frightening reality as soon as
one considers the constantly expanding coverage of the standard
reference source on serials, Ulrich's International Periodicals
Directory. Whereas the 20th edition of Ulrich's for 1981 together with
its companion volume Irregular Serials & Annuals (6th ed. 1980–81)
listed some 96,000 titles, the 34th edition of Ulrich's for 1996 (vol.
1, vii) contained information on nearly 165,000 titles including
irregulars and annuals–a gain of 71.9%. As a base of comparison, it
should be noted that the first edition of this publication (Ulrich
1932) covered 6,000 titles.”
Quotations from: “Scientific and Technical Serials Holdings
Optimization in an Inefficient Market: A LSU Serials Redesign Project
Exercise” by Stephen J. Bensman and Stanley J. Wilder. First appeared
in Library Resources and Technical Services Volume 42 No. 3, 1998, and
currently available on the LSU web site at
http://www.lib.lsu.edu/collserv/lrts/index.html
A graph showing the increase in titles listed by Ulrich over the
period 1972-1989 can be seen at
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/reports/mellon/figures/large/figure5-9.jpg
This is from “University Libraries and Scholarly Communication, A
Study Prepared for The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation”
by Anthony M. Cummings, Marcia L. Witte, William G. Bowen, Laura O.
Lazarus, and Richard H. Ekman, Published by The Association of
Research Libraries for The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
November 1992 The whole report can be accessed at
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/reports/mellon/mellon.html
Chapter 5 of the report discusses how difficult it is to reach
estimates of the number of journal titles, for example how to define a
serial, how to distinguish a scholarly journal from other serials.
Another illustration from the report graphs numbers of journals
according to the dates of their foundation by decade from 1700 to
1990, using data from the Science Citation Index
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/reports/mellon/figures/large/figure5-10.jpg
“This figure shows that the real proliferation in science literature
began in the 1950s, with the number of journals founded in that decade
more than double that of the previous decade. This growth continued
into the 1960s and 1970s, with 43 percent of the journals in this list
founded in those two decades alone. The proliferation tapered somewhat
during the 1980s, with the number founded almost returning to the
1950s level.”
The report does look at journals covering modern languages and
literature, as an example of trends in non-scientific scholarly
publishing, with a graph shown at
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/reports/mellon/figures/large/figure5-11.jpg
“In this field there were substantial increases in the number of
journals founded throughout the post-World War II era. The decade of
the 1970s, however, stands out, as it alone witnessed the founding of
more than 400 new journals (fig. 5.11). Although there was a
pronounced slowing in the rate of increase in the 1980s, more than
half of the titles currently available were first published during the
last two decades.”
Librarians tend to look at this issue in great detail, since they have
to make decisions on holdings. It might be worth getting a library to
do a search for you on LISA (Library and information science
abstracts)
LISA is a bibliographic database about librarianship, information
science, online retrieval, publishing and information technology. This
database covers over five hundred periodicals from over sixty
countries. It also includes unpublished academic and institutional
research from the Current Research in Library and Information Science
database. I know it's available on Dialog.
Hope this goes some way to helping your research |
