Today in 1665, the first issue of the Journal des sçavans (later renamed Journal des savants), was published in Paris.
It is widely regarded as the first scientific journal but a more apt description would be a journal for men of letters as it also carried non-scientific material such as book reviews, obituaries of famous men, church history, and legal reports. The next day, January 6, 1665, saw the publication of the first (exclusively) scientific journal, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. The two were followed by Giornale de litterati d’Italia (Italy, 1668), Miscellenea Curiosa (Germany, 1670), Acta Medica et Philosophia Hafniensa (Denmark, 1673), and Acta Eruditorum (Germany, 1682).
Lewis Pyenson and Susan Sheets-Pyenson in Servants of Nature:
The scientific paper or journal article eventually displaced the definitive and comprehensive book as the appropriate showcase for a scientist’s work. This development hastened the process of specialization, whereby scientists strove for mastery of an ever more narrowly circumscribed area of knowledge.
In 1944, Fremont Rider, the University Librarian at Wesleyan, calculated that American research libraries were, on the average, doubling in size every sixteen years. Given this growth rate, he estimated that the Yale Library would have in 2040 “approximately 200,000.000 volumes, which will occupy over 6,000 miles of shelves…. New material will be coming in at the rate of 12,000,000 volumes a year; and the cataloging of this new material will require a cataloging staff of over six thousand persons.”
In The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), Daniel Bell observed that
The idea of exponentiality, the idea that scientific knowledge accumulates “linearly” in some compound fashion, has obscured the fact that the more typical, and important, pattern is the development of “branching,” or the creation of new and numerous subdivisions or specialties within fields, rather than just growth…. One can find some evidence of the extraordinary proliferation of fields in the breakdown of specializations listed in the National Register of Scientific and Technical Personnel… The Register began shortly after World War II with about 54 specializations in the sciences; 20 years later there were over 900 scientific and technical specializations listed.
In 2020, there were 46,736 academic journals publishing papers worldwide. From 2010 to 2020, the number of academic journals increased by 28.7%, growing at an average rate of 2.56% every year.
In 2022, 5.14 million academic articles were published, including short surveys, reviews, and conference proceedings. China led, for the first time, with 19.67% of all academic papers published, followed by the United States with 17.04% share.