Trends in biochemical literature

Based on information extracted horn the Science Citation Index* (SCP) data base, I fmd that, in terms of articles published, the biochemical literature is still growing faster than the scientific literature as a whole. What’s more, the number of references in a typical biochemical article is increasing as is the proportion of references to material more than five years older than the citing article. For the purposes of this paper we have looked at 37 ‘core’ primary journals. Our study encompassed the years 1968-1977 for all core journals (Table I), and also included 1962–1967 for the journals used by Harte*. I refer to the journals studied by Harte as the ‘CEBJ journals’, since their editors are full members of the Committee of Editors of Biochemical Journals of the IUB. Of the 37 journals studied, 16 started publication in 1962 or later. Of these, eight started publication in 1970 or later. Thus, just in the number of journals considered important to biochemists, there has been a 76% increase in 16 years. Table 1shows that the number of articles per year produced by the core biochemistry journals increased from 9060 in 1968 to 14,418 in 1977. This amounts to an annual growth rate of 5,3% or a doubling time of 13.4 years. If we look at only the CEBJ journals for the same time period, we find that the number of articles they published annually increased from 6766 to 8491. This is an annual growth rate of 2.6%; however, non-CEBJ journals increased their output at an average annual rate of 11.1%. The higher growth rate for the nonCEBJ journals is partly due to the birth of new journals. But it also results from the fact that the increase in the average number of items published per year was greater for non-CEBJ core journals. Table II shows that the average number of items published per year by a CEBJ journal increased from 615 in 1968 to 772 in 1977 – an increase of 26%, The average number of items published by a non-CEBJ core journal increased from 143 in 1968 to 228 in 1977an increase of 59%. Over the longer period of 1962-1977 the CEBJ journals had an average annual growth rate of 5,1 %. This growth rate conflicts with Harte’s findings for the same journals for essentially the same time period (9.8%) but since detailed data were not provided in Harte’s report, we have not been able to identify the reason for this difference, For the earlier period of 1962-1967, the CEBJ journals had an average annual growth rate of 8.1% – about three times greater than the growth of the CEBJ journals during 196%1 977. These data clearly confirm the exponential growth that the literature experienced in the 1960s and the general slowdown which has occurred in the 1970s. The 5.3% average annual growth rate observed for the core biochemical journals