There's a widespread perception among scientists that we're living in an era of relentless growth in terms of the number of scientific papers being published.
Many say that quantity has increased at the expense of quality: people are publishing "any old rubbish" or splitting their work into as many papers as possible, driven by the publish-or-perish culture of modern academia.
But is this true? To try and find out, I looked at the number of papers published each year, in English, on PubMed, for the past 30 years.
Here's the data: it shows an increase in the number of papers coming out each year, except for a small negative blip around the year 1997:
Now, when I first eyeballed this curve, I got the impression that growth has accelerated recently, consistent with the "recent pressure to publish" idea.
But here's the same data with each year's publications expressed as a ...
