[GOAL] How many researchers are there?

[Arthur Sale]

I am trying to get a rough estimate of the number of active researchers in
the world. Unfortunately all the estimates seem to be as rough as the famous
Drake equation for calculating the number of technological civilizations in
the universe: in other words all the factors are extremely fuzzy.  I seek
your help. My interest is that this is the number of people who need to
adopt OA for us to have 100% OA. (Actually, we will approach that sooner, as
the average publication has more than one author and we need only one to
make it OA.

 

To share some thinking, let me take Australia. In 2011 it had 35
universities and 29,226 academic staff with a PhD. Let me assume that this
is the number of research active staff. The average per institution is 835,
and this spans big universities down to small ones. Australia produces
according to the OECD 2.5% of the world's research, so let's estimate the
number of active researchers in the world (taking Australia as 'typical' of
researchers) as 29226 / 0.025 = 1,169,040 researchers in universities. Note
that I have not counted non-university research organizations (they'll make
a small difference) nor PhD students (there is usually a supervisor listed
in the author list of any publication they produce).

 

Let's take another tack. I have read the number of 10,000 research
universities in the world bandied about. Let's regard 'research university'
as equal to 'PhD-granting university'. If each of them have 1,000 research
active staff on average, then that implies 10000 x 1000 = 10,000,000
researchers.

 

That narrows the estimate, rough as it is, to

         1.1M  < no of researchers < 10M

I can live with this, as it is only one power of ten (order of magnitude)
between the two bounds. The upper limit is around 0.2% of the world's
population.

 

Another tactic is to try to estimate the number of people whose name
appeared in an author list in the last decade. Disambiguation of names rears
its ugly head. This will also include many non-researchers in big labs, some
of them will be dead, and there will be new researchers who have just not
yet published, but I am looking for ball-park figures, not pinpoint
accuracy. I haven't done this work yet.

 

Can we do better than these estimates, in the face of different national
styles?  It is even difficult to get one number for PhD granting
universities in the US, and as for India and China @$#!

 

Arthur Sale

University of Tasmania, Australia

 

 

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