[GOAL] Re: How many researchers are there?

Tue Jan 3 04:43:33 GMT 2012

Thank you Arif.  I have read the article this afternoon (3 January) and will
download and look through your thesis asap.

However I feel compelled to re-emphasize to the list that I am not looking
for an estimate of how many articles are published annually, or ever. The
first of those pieces of data is useful for estimating what I really want to
know: how many active researchers are employed in year y? Particularly 2011.
Of course, it will be useful to have article counts by discipline, however
rough, because publication practices differ widely between disciplines. A
publication in some disciplines is worth far less than in others, the number
of authors/article differs widely, and journal prestige varies at least as
much.

There are many other confusing factors in estimates based on article
production rates which I touched on in my reply to Stevan Harnad, not least
of which is the frequency of publication of equally highly respected
researchers. Some publish rarely (say once every three years), others
produce multiple articles per year. There are distributions in all these
things which we should understand. If I mention just one, the huge disparity
between articles/title in ISI and non-ISI journals listed in your article
(111 vs 26, from Bjork et al) must give anyone cause to reflect! That's over
4:1, too big to gloss over.

I know of course that I cannot determine exactly the number of researchers
in the world, any more than anyone else can determine exactly how many
articles were written or published.  As an engineer in a previous career,
absolute precision in these matters is not required, rather sufficient
confidence that we are in the right ballpark. Anyway, thank you very much
for your help and links, which I greatly appreciate.

Arthur Sale

University of Tasmania

From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] On Behalf
Of Arif Jinha
Sent: Tuesday, 3 January 2012 5:26 AM
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Subject: [GOAL] Re: How many researchers are there?

Arthur,

You're not going to be able to determine the exact number of researchers in
the world and you will have to make good estimates. But there are direct
relationships between the number of researchers, the number of articles
published annually and the number of active peer-reviewed journals. Good
sources for methodology are my thesis
<http://arif.jinhabrothers.com/sites/arif.jinhabrothers.com/files/aj.pdf> -
http://arif.jinhabrothers.com/sites/arif.jinhabrothers.com/files/aj.pdf
(defended and submitted this fall)

- Article 50 million -
<http://www.mendeley.com/research/article-50-million-estimate-number-scholar
ly-articles-existence-6/>
http://www.mendeley.com/research/article-50-million-estimate-number-scholarl
y-articles-existence-6/

Methods and data are based chiefly on:

Bjork et al's studies on OA share growth 2006 to current

Mabe and Amin, Tenopir and King - works 1990s to early 2000s

Derek De Sallo Price - 1960s - the 'father of scientometrics.

- you can get the number of article from Bjork's methods and data and mine.

- you can get the number of researchers from UN data but there is ratio of
researchers to publishing researchers, and publishing researchers publish an
average of 1 article per year, so if you can determine good estimate for
that ratio you are on your way. You have good data on growth rates of
researchers, articles and journals, but growth rates have increased
dramatically since 2000 as demonstrated in my thesis.  It got a bit complex
and I tried to sort it best I could in my thesis.

all the best,

Arif

----- Original Message ----- 

From: Arthur Sale <mailto:ahjs at ozemail.com.au>  

To: 'Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)' <mailto:goal at eprints.org>

Sent: Saturday, December 31, 2011 6:25 PM

Subject: [GOAL] How many researchers are there?

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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