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Since Derek de Solla Price's Little Science - Big Science (1963) it is known that the number of scientific publications grows exponentially. It's also known that more and more publications are published electronically. I am looking for studies that compare the actual growth of both. How does the fraction of digital publications compared to printed publications rise?

Sure an answer depends on where one draws the line between a publication and just any digital content. Any actual studies that try to measure the growth based on some definition? By the way I am not interested in the amout of information, but in the number of publications because libraries primarily collect publications.

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It may be better to frame it in terms of "How has the number grown" in the title, but otherwise, interesting question! – jonsca♦ Aug 4 '12 at 15:11
It's still growing and I'm also interested in predictions. Feel free, however, to edit my English ;-) – Jakob Aug 4 '12 at 15:14
Your English is fine. :) I just wanted to pull the question out of the hypothetical a bit, but I understand what you are going for a little better now. – jonsca♦ Aug 4 '12 at 15:18
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I am posting this as a comment because it isn't really an answer, move it in case. I have asked this question to ABC UK, the industry body for media measurement (abc.org.uk/About-us/What-we-do), and in short they have answered that they collect data but do not analyse them or do research on them, and they are not aware of any resource available on the subject. I can post the full exchange if needed - I know it does not help but it shows that it is a "difficult" topic. – Eleonora Aug 6 '12 at 15:38

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That's a really good question. Part of the answer depends on how you're defining "publish." Typically printed materials go through a rigorous publication process. Our definitions for what is digitally published are much broader and more fluid. Do you mean something that is reviewed, vetted and signed off on by a trusted publishing organization? or do you mean published to the web? or something else?

In terms of the digital universe, this report is a great place to start.

Highlights:

  • In 2011, the amount of information created and replicated will surpass 1.8 zettabytes (1.8 trillion gigabytes) - growing by a factor of 9 in just five years.

  • 75% of the information in the digital universe is generated by individuals,

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The study mainly talks about "information" measured in bytes. I am interested in number of publications. Any number is useless without a definiton of "publish", so I am also interested in definitions. For instance: number of ebooks with ISBN, number of Tweets on Twitter, number of blog postings, number of articles archived in repositories etc. – Jakob Aug 10 '12 at 14:26

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