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Published: 20 July 2016

Scientific literature: Information overload

Esther Landhuis 1

Nature volume 535 , pages 457–458 ( 2016 ) Cite this article

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How to manage the research-paper deluge? Blogs, colleagues and social media can all help.

Journals, journals everywhere — how to stay on top of it all? For ecologist Aerin Jacob, like many others, there is no single way.

She scans journal e-alerts for tables of content. She follows a carefully chosen roster of scientists on Twitter. She gets recommendations through speciality listservs, professional-society Facebook pages and updates on Google Scholar. Each week, she attends seminars, blocks off three hours to read papers and organizes a weekly, interdisciplinary journal club.

All of this takes 6–8 hours per week. “It's easy to feel like you're barely keeping your head above the flood of information,” says Jacob, a postdoc in conservation planning at the University of Victoria in Canada.

how many medical research papers are published every year

Recent bibliometrics show that the number of published scientific papers has climbed by 8–9% each year over the past several decades. In the biomedical field alone, more than 1 million papers pour into the PubMed database each year — about two papers per minute. For researchers who are already overwhelmed by bench and field work, grant-writing, publishing and other time-eaters, trying to navigate the growing deluge of data (see 'Sailing the data seas') has become a second job. Here's how some of them cope.

Club together

Teaming up can be a good way to stay on top of new studies. That's what Lawton Chung did with a few classmates who, like him, recently completed doctorates in molecular genetics and microbiology at Stony Brook University in New York. To avoid missing important papers, the group started a 'journal scan' — each member is assigned several journals and tasked with scouting for interesting papers and sharing finds with the group about once a month.

Others use aggregator sites to keep current. Postdoc Pavlo Kochkin, who studies atmospheric physics at the University of Bergen in Norway, organizes his reading list with news-aggregator Feedly . Each morning he opens his Feedly page, which includes RSS feeds from about two dozen scientific journals as well as a few popular sites such as Physics Today and Dutch Daily News. If a paper title catches his interest, he clicks on the abstract. On most days, he scans about 100 titles.

He also has alerts set up with the Google Scholar search engine to monitor publications by specific authors and to scan for keywords in journals in his field. He finds that scientific papers and news articles of particular interest show up on both sites, so he is confident that he rarely misses anything crucial.

Still others choose more deliberately what to read. As a PhD student, chemist Peter Robinson got a sense of recent developments by checking a handful of journals he could access online through institutional subscriptions. Each day he scanned just-accepted abstracts and read a few papers from start to finish. He spent up to 3 hours reading each morning and continued to read through the day in 20–30-minute chunks. Today, as co-founder and chief scientific officer of the start-up Enable Biosciences in Menlo Park, California, he still spends 1–2 hours reading daily — but has added technology and business news to the mix. About two-thirds of his reading is scientific papers, but the rest comes from blogs, social media and industry news aggregators such as FierceBiotech and GenomeWeb .

It's all about who you know

Adam Thomas, a lead data-science officer at the US National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, relies on his virtual and in-person network for updates. He has set up a few automatic searches on Scopus, an Elsevier-owned database of academic journal abstracts and citations. But he relies most heavily on Twitter, Facebook, e-mail distribution lists, lab meetings and visiting speakers to learn about interesting work from colleagues.

With so much new information, we really need curators of content.

Blogs are another way to get fast updates, as well as to interact with other researchers. “With so much new information, we really need curators of content,” Jacob says — “not just aggregators, but people who select and comment on why something is particularly novel or important, bridge disciplines to explain broader relevance, put new content in context of where the field has been and ought to go.” She likes Dynamic Ecology , a group blog written by researchers in her field. Readers comment with thoughts or follow-up questions for the community — and these exchanges help to put information in context, she says.

But there's a lot to be said, too, for old-school face time (the real, physical kind, not the Apple messaging function). Through conferences, journal clubs and seminar series, colleagues catch up and share news of interesting publications or talks. “Word of mouth is really important,” says Chung, who starts a postdoc in September at the University of California, Irvine. It's a way to learn nuanced information that no paper, news story or blog can impart. “Academia and research can be isolating,” Jacob says. “Weekly events can help bring people out of their offices, create a sense of community and teach the culture and norms of the field.”

Curate thyself

Some researchers create their own curation systems. About six years ago, microbiologist Elisabeth Bik of Stanford University in California set up PubMed alerts to stay current on papers in the fast-growing field of microbiomes, and she shared interesting studies with co-workers. But then the field exploded: PubMed alerts clogged her inbox, and she shared more and more papers. Soon she was compiling her finds into weekly, then daily e-mails.

boxed-text Co-workers suggested that other labs might benefit from her round-up, so she created Bik's Picks , a blog that gets 300–500 views daily. Besides links to microbiome publications, it aggregates news stories on microbes and other topics, such as science careers and publishing. She started tweeting some of her blog content (@MicrobiomDigest) 3 years ago, and has more than 6,000 followers.

But Bik admits that the blog is a time-sink. “About two years ago, I could easily scan all the literature published each day in about an hour. Today it takes me two to three hours,” she says. Each day, she scans 30–50 papers through PubMed alerts, dozens of tables of content and publisher alerts, and up to 30 Google and Google Scholar alerts, each consisting of 5–20 papers and articles. She sometimes finds papers on Twitter and occasionally discovers preprints on sites such as bioRxiv, PeerJ and F1000.

Bik spends a few hours every workday morning selecting papers for the blog and tweeting the most interesting ones, then another hour at home on most evenings going through alerts that came in during the day. She receives no financial compensation for her efforts, but her principal investigator lets her spend work hours on the blog because it saves time for the other lab members.

Preprints have yet to gain a foothold in biomedicine, but other fields have a decades-long history of disseminating research before it goes for peer review. Since 1991, arXiv.org has served as a centralized online repository of freely accessible preprints in mathematics, physics, computer science and related disciplines. Moderators review manuscripts before posting them on the site, and most authors eventually submit them for publication in peer-reviewed journals.

In 2007, when astrophysicist James Guillochon started working on his PhD at the University of California, Santa Cruz, his department would meet three times a week for arXiv discussions. But the chats didn't probe very deeply into the new research, says Guillochon, now a postdoc at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He decided in 2009 to create Vox Charta , a version of arXiv for astronomy and astrophysics paper discussions. Through his site, colleagues can prepare for discussions — or decide whether to go at all — by using a voting system to flag the most interesting papers. Because Vox Charta papers come from a centralized source and most of the website is automated, Guillochon says that he spends little time managing the site beyond basic maintenance.

Last September, a pair of physicists created a similar site, Benty Fields , to cover the whole arXiv. The site lets researchers organize arXiv publications into reading lists and vote to put them onto the next discussion agenda. Benty Fields is set up like a social network: users can upload their CV and list of publications into a profile, and colleagues can follow each other.

In today's digital world, it is impossible to stay abreast by reading a few journals, so researchers must identify sources that can provide the crucial data they need for their work and career. “Reflecting on when, where, why and how we consume new information, and whether those behaviours help or hinder our personal and professional goals, moves us closer to becoming more effective scientists,” Jacob says.

Box 1: Sailing the data seas

Here are a few tips for keeping up to date without getting overwhelmed.

Don't try to read everything. “If a paper is really ground-breaking or highly relevant to my work, it will be shared through my network and will turn up in later keyword searches,” says ecologist Aerin Jacob at the University of Victoria in Canada.

Carve out reading time on a regular basis. Jacob blocks off at least one hour three times a week to unplug and read. She doesn't skim the literature; instead, she chooses papers ahead of time, usually one short commentary and one longer or data-heavy paper. Then she prints hard copies, turns off her computer or device and reads.

Go to seminars and meetings. These help to nurture breadth of knowledge. “They ward off the myopia that comes from delving so deeply into our individual research topics,” says Jacob.

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Landhuis, E. Scientific literature: Information overload. Nature 535 , 457–458 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nj7612-457a

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SCIENCE & ENGINEERING INDICATORS

Publications output: u.s. trends and international comparisons.

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Publication Output by Region, Country, or Economy and by Scientific Field

This section of the report outlines trends over time in publication output across regions, countries, or economies and by fields of science. This section also provides insights into the research contributions of different regions, countries, or economies and how the focus of their scientific publications has changed over time. In addition, the section highlights variations in the distribution of publications across scientific fields for different regions, countries, or economies and examines trends over time in closed-access and open-access (OA) publications. This section also summarizes federal funding acknowledgments as a source of data to shed light on published research that received federal funding. (See sidebar Using Funding Acknowledgments to Track Federally Funded Research Over Time .)

Output by Region, Country, or Economy

Total worldwide S&E publication output reached 3.3 million articles in 2022, based on entries in the Scopus database. Indicators 2018 : Bibliometric Data Filters )." data-bs-content="Publication output includes only those indexed in the Scopus database. The publication output discussion uses fractional counting, which credits coauthored publications according to the collaborating institutions or regions, countries, or economies based on the proportion of their participating authors. Country assignments refer to the institutional address of authors, with partial credit given for each international coauthorship. As part of the data analysis, filters were employed on the raw Scopus S&E publication data to remove publications with questionable quality, which appear in what are sometimes called predatory journals (NSB Indicators 2018 : Bibliometric Data Filters )." data-endnote-uuid="a5778137-c92e-4694-991d-a1545bdcca18"> Publication output includes only those indexed in the Scopus database. The publication output discussion uses fractional counting, which credits coauthored publications according to the collaborating institutions or regions, countries, or economies based on the proportion of their participating authors. Country assignments refer to the institutional address of authors, with partial credit given for each international coauthorship. As part of the data analysis, filters were employed on the raw Scopus S&E publication data to remove publications with questionable quality, which appear in what are sometimes called predatory journals (NSB Indicators 2018 : Bibliometric Data Filters ). Approximately 86% of publications in 2022 came from regions, countries, or economies with high-income and upper-middle-income economies ( Figure PBS-1 ). The number of publications from all income-level groups grew between 2003 and 2022 ( Table SPBS-2 ). Also, the number of publications from upper-middle-income economies grew more quickly than the number from high-income economies during the more recent period between 2010 and 2022.

For grouped bar charts, Tab to the first data element (bar/line data point) which will bring up a pop-up with the data details
To read the data in all groups Arrow-Down will go back and forth
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S&E publications, by income group: 2003–22

Article counts refer to publications from a selection of conference proceedings and peer-reviewed journals in S&E fields from Scopus. Articles are classified by their year of publication and are assigned to a region, country, or economy on the basis of the institutional address(es) of the author(s) listed in the article. Articles are credited on a fractional count basis (i.e., for articles produced by authors from different regions, countries, or economies, each region, country, or economy receives fractional credit on the basis of the proportion of its participating authors). Data are not directly comparable with data from Science and Engineering Indicators 2022 ; see the Technical Appendix for information on data filters. Low-income regions, countries, or economies are not included in this figure because of their low publication output. Data by region, country, or economy and income group are available in Table SPBS-2 . Regions, countries, or economies are allocated to income groups based on World Bank data, using their current designation. For example, all of China’s publications from 2003 to 2022 are counted as part of the upper-middle-income category because that is China's current designation.

National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics; Science-Metrix; Elsevier, Scopus abstract and citation database, accessed April 2023; World Bank Country and Lending Groups, accessed May 2023.

Science and Engineering Indicators

In 2022, six regions, countries, or economies each produced more than 100,000 articles: China, the United States, India, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Japan. Together, these leading regions, countries, or economies accounted for over 50% of the worldwide total in 2022 ( Figure PBS-2 ; Table PBS-1 ). Figure PBS-2 and Table PBS-1 , or whole counting, as in Table SPBS-17 . There is a slight difference between the United States and China when looking at the whole-counting total production numbers. Using whole counting for 2022, the United States had 605,633 articles, whereas China had 976,141. A whole-counting measure allocates one full count to each region, country, or economy with an author contributing to the article; in fractional counting, each region, country, or economy receives a proportion of the count based on the number of authors from that region, country, or economy. For example, if an article had four authors—two from the United States, one from China, and one from Brazil—the fractional scores would be half for the United States, a quarter for China, and a quarter for Brazil. The difference between whole and fractional counting indicates that the United States has more authors working with Chinese authors than China has working with U.S. authors." data-bs-content="The proportion of output attributable to the large producers is consistent whether using fractional counting, as in Figure PBS-2 and Table PBS-1 , or whole counting, as in Table SPBS-17 . There is a slight difference between the United States and China when looking at the whole-counting total production numbers. Using whole counting for 2022, the United States had 605,633 articles, whereas China had 976,141. A whole-counting measure allocates one full count to each region, country, or economy with an author contributing to the article; in fractional counting, each region, country, or economy receives a proportion of the count based on the number of authors from that region, country, or economy. For example, if an article had four authors—two from the United States, one from China, and one from Brazil—the fractional scores would be half for the United States, a quarter for China, and a quarter for Brazil. The difference between whole and fractional counting indicates that the United States has more authors working with Chinese authors than China has working with U.S. authors." data-endnote-uuid="a3ba485a-d862-4069-8166-933aa601ea66"> The proportion of output attributable to the large producers is consistent whether using fractional counting, as in Figure PBS-2 and Table PBS-1 , or whole counting, as in Table SPBS-17 . There is a slight difference between the United States and China when looking at the whole-counting total production numbers. Using whole counting for 2022, the United States had 605,633 articles, whereas China had 976,141. A whole-counting measure allocates one full count to each region, country, or economy with an author contributing to the article; in fractional counting, each region, country, or economy receives a proportion of the count based on the number of authors from that region, country, or economy. For example, if an article had four authors—two from the United States, one from China, and one from Brazil—the fractional scores would be half for the United States, a quarter for China, and a quarter for Brazil. The difference between whole and fractional counting indicates that the United States has more authors working with Chinese authors than China has working with U.S. authors. In absolute numbers, the growth in worldwide annual publication output (from 2.0 million in 2010 to 3.3 million in 2022) was driven in particular by two countries: China (42% of additional publications during that period) and India (11%) together accounted for more than half of that increase in publications ( Figure PBS-3 ). Russia, South Korea, Iran, and Brazil made notable contributions to the growth in the number of publications from the rest of the world from 2010 to 2022 ( Figure PBS-3 ; Table SPBS-2 ). Generally, the set of the top 15 producers of S&E articles was the same each year between 2010 and 2022, with the exception of Iran replacing Taiwan in the top 15 beginning in 2014 ( Table PBS-1 ; Table SPBS-2 ).

S&E publications for 10 leading regions, countries, or economies: 2022

National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics; Science-Metrix; Elsevier, Scopus abstract and citation database, accessed April 2023.

S&E publications in all fields for 15 largest producing regions, countries, or economies: 2012 and 2022

na = not applicable.

The regions, countries, or economies are ranked based on the 2022 total. Article counts refer to publications from conference proceedings and peer-reviewed journal articles in S&E and indexed in Scopus (see Technical Appendix for more details). Articles are classified by their year of publication and are assigned to a region, country, or economy on the basis of the institutional address(es) of the author(s) listed in the article. Articles are credited on a fractional count basis (i.e., for articles from multiple regions, countries, or economies, each region, country, or economy receives fractional credit on the basis of the proportion of its participating authors). Detail may not add to total because of regions, countries, or economies that are not shown. Proportions are based on the world total excluding unclassified addresses (data not presented). Details and other regions, countries, or economies are available in Table SPBS-2 .

S&E publications, by selected region, country, or economy and rest of world: 2003–22

The U.S. trend of moderate but increasing publication output varied by state. The National Science Board’s (NSB’s) State Data Tool ( https://ncses.nsf.gov/indicators/states/ ) provides state-level data based on each state’s doctorate population and research and development (R&D) funding. Indicators include academic S&E article output per 1,000 science, engineering, and health doctorate holders in academia (NSB 2021a) and academic S&E article output per $1 million in academic S&E R&D funding (NSB 2021b).

Output by Scientific Field

The distribution of publications by field of science across region, country, or economy may indicate research priorities and capabilities. Health sciences was the field of science in which most articles were published in 2022, representing almost a quarter of all publications ( Table SPBS-2 and Table SPBS-10 ). Other fields with large numbers of publications included engineering (17% of publications in 2022), biological and biomedical sciences (13%), and social sciences (5%) ( Table SPBS-2 , Table SPBS-5 , Table SPBS-8 , and Table SPBS-16 ). In the United States, the European Union (EU-27), and Japan, health sciences publication output in 2022 far exceeded that of any other field. Table SPBS-17 through Table SPBS-31 )." data-bs-content="The use of whole counting or fractional counting to tally the publication output of nations can change the calculated publication count based on the degree to which a region, country, or economy is involved in international collaborations. Under whole counting, a nation receives credit for any publication with an author from that nation. Under fractional counting, the nation’s credit for a publication is prorated based on the share of the publication’s coauthors who are located in that nation ( Table SPBS-17 through Table SPBS-31 )." data-endnote-uuid="05c8023f-5250-4386-96cf-f321c7f293c4"> The use of whole counting or fractional counting to tally the publication output of nations can change the calculated publication count based on the degree to which a region, country, or economy is involved in international collaborations. Under whole counting, a nation receives credit for any publication with an author from that nation. Under fractional counting, the nation’s credit for a publication is prorated based on the share of the publication’s coauthors who are located in that nation ( Table SPBS-17 through Table SPBS-31 ). Meanwhile, of the other top producers, publications from China were most highly concentrated in engineering (25%), and publications from India were published predominantly in computer and information sciences (21%) ( Figure PBS-4 ).

Distribution of national S&E research portfolios across scientific fields, by selected region, country, or economy: 2022

EU-27 = European Union.

Articles refer to publications from a selection of conference proceedings and peer-reviewed journals in S&E fields from Scopus. Articles are classified by their year of publication and are assigned to a region, country, or economy on the basis of the institutional address(es) of the author(s) listed in the article. Articles are credited on a fractional count basis (i.e., for articles from multiple countries, each country receives fractional credit on the basis of the proportion of its participating authors). See Table SPBS-1 for countries included in the EU; beginning in 2020, the United Kingdom was no longer a member of the EU. See Table SPBS-3 through Table SPBS-16 for data on all regions, countries, and economies by each S&E field.

Fields within life sciences were dominant in the United States in 2022, with more than half of all U.S. publications in health sciences (37%) or biological and biomedical sciences (14%) ( Figure PBS-5 ). There were fewer U.S. publications in engineering (11%), computer and information sciences (7%), and physics (5%). In comparison with the United States, China had a stronger focus on publications in engineering and in the physical sciences and information sciences. In 2022, 25% of China’s publications were in engineering, 11% were in computer and information sciences, and 9% were in physics ( Figure PBS-6 ). Compared with the United States, China had a lower percentage of its publications in health sciences (14%) and biological and biomedical sciences (12%). In 2022, China also had a much lower percentage of its publications in social sciences (1%) when compared with the United States (8%).

U.S. S&E publication portfolio, by field of science: 2022

Articles refer to publications from a selection of conference proceedings and peer-reviewed journals in S&E fields from Scopus. Articles are classified by their year of publication and are assigned to a region, country, or economy on the basis of the institutional address(es) of the author(s) listed in the article. Articles are credited on a fractional count basis (i.e., for articles from multiple countries, each country receives fractional credit on the basis of the proportion of its participating authors). See Table SPBS-3 through Table SPBS-16 for data on all regions, countries, and economies by each S&E field.

S&E publication portfolio from China, by field of science: 2022

Articles refer to publications from a selection of conference proceedings and peer-reviewed journals in S&E fields from Scopus. Articles are classified by their year of publication and are assigned to a region, country, or economy on the basis of the institutional address(es) of the author(s) listed in the article. Articles are credited on a fractional count basis (i.e., for articles from multiple countries, each country receives fractional credit on the basis of the proportion of its participating authors). See Table SPBS-3 through Table SPBS-16 for data on all regions, countries, and economies and by each S&E field.

All the leading regions, countries, or economies saw an increase in their output of health sciences publications between 2010 and 2022. This increase is to be expected, given the context of increasing publication rates in general over that period, with overall number of publications increasing by 71% ( Table SPBS-2 ), while publications in health sciences increased by 66% ( Table SPBS-10 ). Russia had the highest relative growth rate among the 20 leading regions, countries, or economies in health sciences, increasing its publication output by almost 450% between 2010 and 2022 ( Table SPBS-10 ). China and Iran each increased their output of health sciences publications by more than 250% over this period, while India’s health sciences publication output increased by more than 180%. The United States increased its output of health sciences publications by 32% over this period, while Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Japan had the smallest increases, each with less than 20%.

Leading regions, countries, or economies also saw increases in engineering publications. The fastest growing between 2010 and 2022 were India (up 378%) and Russia (up 230%) ( Table SPBS-8 ). China increased its output of engineering publications by 176% from 2010 to 2022, while France, the United States, and Japan all saw declines in newly published engineering articles per year over this period (3%, 13%, and 26%, respectively).

In the United States, publication output varied from that of other regions, countries, or economies with respect to scientific fields. Of the fields not already mentioned, the fastest growing from 2010 to 2022 were psychology (up 39% from 2010 to 2022) and the social sciences (up 38%) ( Figure PBS-7 ). Meanwhile, fields with the largest decreases in U.S. publications included physics (down 31% from 2010 to 2022) and materials science (down 16%).

Index of U.S. publications, by field: 2010–22

Using funding acknowledgments to track federally funded research over time.

Federally funded research is an important component of the research ecosystem and is often envisioned as a means of supporting science performed for public benefit that may not otherwise be motivated by commercial interest (Bornmann 2013; Stephan 2012; Yin et al. 2022). Federal research funding supports applied and basic research (see Indicators 2022 report “ Research and Development: U.S. Trends and International Comparisons ”) and has long been linked to successful expansions in scientific production—through the increased productivity and impact of individual researchers and laboratories (Ebadi and Schiffauerova 2016) and the national scale (Leydesdorff and Wagner 2009). This sidebar explores funding acknowledgments, as recorded in Scopus, as an emerging source to help illustrate the extent to which published research is supported by federal agencies and the trends in federally funded research. Specifically, the share of published research acknowledging support by federal funding was highest in chemistry and smaller in other fields, such as the social sciences ( Table PBS-A ). These differences may be driven by factors such as the resource costs to conduct research and by field differences, such as the overall frequency of publication, team size, and cultural differences among the disciplines. The time period analyzed in this sidebar is 2018–22, unless otherwise indicated.

Funding acknowledgments can shed light on the ability and priorities of federal funding to support discovery as measured by peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings. However, some benefits and limitations of this emerging data source are important to highlight so as to accurately interpret these trends. Each peer-reviewed journal article and conference proceeding in the Scopus database includes a field for funding acknowledgments that are extracted by algorithmic (software) means. In some cases where the acknowledgments field is incomplete, funding information from agencies is also used to identify funded publications in Scopus. Using this field, it is possible to observe the conversion of federal funds to published research outputs, but a direct linkage between funding inputs and published discoveries remains challenging. First, extraction of this information into a structured field is a relatively new effort and is most complete for the most recent 4 years. Figure SPBS-1 shows how funding acknowledgment sections have grown in coverage since 2003 and that funding information was indexed for 68% of all publications in 2022. * Many factors may have contributed to this growth in addition to improved extraction, including increasing pressure and requirements from funders to include funding acknowledgments, standardization of acknowledgment language, and incentives to demonstrate high publication output—because future funding is tied to past conversion of funds into publications—while receiving funding. † Last, this inquiry helps explore research that acknowledges any federal funding but does not only account for publications that source all their funding from a single source. In practice, a publication may be generated using funding from multiple sources within the federal government, or from additional sources in state government, local government, or the private sector.

U.S. S&E publications with and without acknowledgments of U.S. federal funding: 2003–22

Articles are classified by their year of publication and are assigned to a region, country, or economy on the basis of the institutional address(es) of the author(s) listed in the article. Whole counting is used. An article is considered to be federally funded if the funding information tied with the publication record in Scopus links it with one of the U.S. federal agencies. Not all Scopus publications have funding information available, and coverage has evolved with time. For more information, see Figure SPBS-1 . For a breakdown of federally funded papers by funding agency, see Table SPBS-90 .

National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics; Science-Metrix; Elsevier, Scopus abstract and citation database, accessed April 2023.

Figure PBS-A tracks the growth of federally funded publications relative to the total research production in the United States. Other than a small downturn from 2021 to 2022, every year has seen an increase from the previous year in the number of publications that acknowledge funding support from federal agencies. The most comprehensive data from the past 4 years show variation among subject areas in the percentage of publications that acknowledge federal support. Table PBS-A shows number and share of publications appearing between 2018 and 2022 that acknowledged funding from federal sources and those acknowledging funding from other sources. During this time, more than 50% of publications in the following subject fields acknowledged federal funding support: chemistry (55% of publications), biological and biomedical sciences (53%), astronomy and astrophysics (53%), and physics (52%). Only two subject areas have less than 30% of publications with federal funding acknowledged: agricultural sciences (28%), and social sciences (15%). Otherwise, all other fields had between 30% and 50% of their publications acknowledging federal funding.

U.S. S&E publications, by U.S. federal funding status and field: 2018–22

In conclusion, federal funding plays an important role in the current research environment in the United States. Of the 606,144 articles published in journals and conference proceedings in 2022, 35% acknowledged support from federal agencies ( Figure PBS-A ). Ultimately, acknowledgment of federal funding can help show trends in the conversion of grants into published research over time and show variation at the subject or field level.

* Missing data in funding fields in a Scopus entry may mean that the research did not receive funding, the authors did not cite any funding despite receiving it, or the algorithm was unable to extract the acknowledgment. Of the articles from 2003 that had an entry for funding acknowledgment (27% had text in the funding field in Scopus), around 76% acknowledged a federal funding source. Comparatively, of the publications in 2022 with indexed funding information (68%), 52% acknowledged a federal source. The growth of coverage of funding not being tied to federal funding acknowledgments provides evidence that the data source has become more dependable over time. Data for the percentage of publications with indexed funding sources by year and field can be found in Figure SPBS-1 .

† Table SPBS-90 displays the number of articles and conference proceedings acknowledging federal funding at the agency level and sub-agency level. These counts represent the number of supported articles as acknowledged and attributed in Scopus from 2003 to 2022.

Output and Open Access

There is growing support for the availability of S&E publications through OA sources among government and private funders, institutions, and scientists themselves. Some of these funders have imposed requirements on their grantees to publish their research results in OA journals. In the United States, the Office of Science and Technology Policy announced that all federal agencies should update their public access policies as soon as possible to ensure that results of their funded research are publicly available, with full implementation of these policies by the end of 2025 (Brainard and Kaiser 2022). Meanwhile, restricted access to scientific literature may impede researchers’ ability to stay informed (Larivière and Sugimoto 2018; Piwowar et al. 2018). As alternatives to traditional closed-access journals (where readers must subscribe to gain access or pay per article), articles may be made OA through several avenues, with different levels of availability and durability.

There are four commonly defined types of OA: Gold, Hybrid, Bronze, and Green. Gold OA denotes articles published in journals that are entirely OA as a matter of journal policy. Hybrid OA denotes articles for which the authors have elected to pay a fee for publication as OA rather than as closed access. Bronze OA denotes articles that appear as OA after an embargo period of closed access or articles that appear available as OA despite lacking license information to guarantee OA in the long term. Green OA denotes articles that are self-archived by authors in OA repositories, which are often maintained, curated, and administered by universities or other institutions. The Hybrid and Bronze categories have been combined as Other Journal-Based OA in this report because of their similar structure as journal-hosted types of OA that allow only conditional—and potentially revocable—OA.

The number of articles published annually in closed-access journals increased by 112% between 2003 and 2022 ( Figure PBS-8 ). Over the same period, annual publishing of Green OA articles increased by 228%, while Other Journal-Based OA articles (Hybrid and Bronze OA) increased by 198%. Gold OA articles (which are published in OA journals with no restrictions) had the largest percentage growth, from 19,089 articles in 2003 to 991,805 articles in 2022, an increase of over 5,000%. Hence, although the majority (77%) of S&E articles in 2003 whose access status is known were published in closed-access journals, fewer than half (49%) were in closed-access journals in 2022.

S&E publications, by publication access type: 2003–22

OA = open access.

Articles refer to publications from a selection of conference proceedings and peer-reviewed journals in S&E fields from Scopus. Articles are classified by their year of publication. OA types are mutually exclusive. For articles published under multiple OA types, the article will be counted as part of only the first type it matches in this list: Gold OA, Other Journal-Based OA, or Green OA. Summing all OA and closed-access article counts results in a smaller number of articles than for all S&E because the access status of some articles (e.g., those without digital object identifiers) cannot be reliably ascertained. Green articles are published in toll-access journals but archived in an OA archive, or "repository." These repositories may be discipline specific (like arXiv) or institutional repositories operated by universities or other institutions. Green articles may be published versions or preprints and can have any license or no license. Bronze (Other Journal-Based OA) articles are free to read on the publisher's website, without a license that grants any other rights. There may be a delay between publication and availability to read, and often articles can be removed unilaterally by the publisher. Hybrid (Other Journal-Based OA) articles are free to read at the time of publication, with an open license. These are usually published in exchange for an article processing charge. Gold articles have all the same characteristics as Hybrid articles but are published in all-OA journals, which are in turn called "Gold journals" or just "OA journals."

To conclude this section, the findings of the output analysis reveal the growth in scientific publications over time, with upper-middle-income economies exhibiting particularly large percentage increases. Meanwhile, the distribution of publications across scientific fields shows that life sciences dominated in the United States, Europe, and Japan, whereas publications in engineering and computer sciences dominated in China and India. In OA, the dramatic growth of Gold OA publications and the steady growth of publications in other OA categories show an increased shift toward open science. However, OA can impede the dissemination of some scientific research. Publishing research as OA often requires authors to pay article processing fees, which may be prohibitive for scientists in less-developed nations or whose funders do not subsidize those fees. https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/pricing . Wiley APCs are at https://authorservices.wiley.com/author-resources/Journal-Authors/open-access/article-publication-charges.html . Springer Nature APCs are at https://www.springernature.com/gp/open-research/journals-books/journals ." data-bs-content="Many publishers make their article processing charges (APCs) known publicly. For example, a list of Elsevier APCs can be found at https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/pricing . Wiley APCs are at https://authorservices.wiley.com/author-resources/Journal-Authors/open-access/article-publication-charges.html . Springer Nature APCs are at https://www.springernature.com/gp/open-research/journals-books/journals ." data-endnote-uuid="9a612a36-466d-4d60-af1a-57e93bd50e76"> Many publishers make their article processing charges (APCs) known publicly. For example, a list of Elsevier APCs can be found at https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/pricing . Wiley APCs are at https://authorservices.wiley.com/author-resources/Journal-Authors/open-access/article-publication-charges.html . Springer Nature APCs are at https://www.springernature.com/gp/open-research/journals-books/journals . The fees can be seen as shifting the costs of accessing research from readers and libraries to authors (Larivière and Sugimoto 2018).