02/23/2021

Scientific Output in the Year of COVID-19

An update

In November of last year, I wrote about the anticipated market growth for journal articles in 2020. While many of the key findings of that article hold true, their size in some places was over- or under-estimated. While 2020 was indeed a record year for the growth of scholarly journals (8 percent Year on Year [YoY] paper growth vs a Compounded Annual Growth Rate [CAGR] of 3 percent in the previous six years), this growth falls short of my original expectations for a minimum growth of 17 percent.

I offer my apologies for presenting inaccurate analysis to the readers and editors of this blog. Here, I show the updated findings, explain the source of the inaccuracies, and discuss some of the challenges of using databases for market sizing.

Revisiting the findings

Once again, I use data from Dimensions and define the market as the journals in the ERA 2018 list, which was devised for national research evaluations in Australia, includes about 25,000 journals, and has a high overlap with the selective indexes of Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Scholarly Kitchen.