2005/02/15 by Kaushik Matia, Luı́s A. Nunes Amaral, Luis A. Nunes Amaral +9
Decision Sciences · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Physics and Astronomy · #Complex Systems and Time Series Analysis #FOS: Physical sciences #Innovation Diffusion and Forecasting #Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph) #physics.soc-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.physics/0502083
arxiv created 2005/02/15 · openalex publication_date 2005/02/15 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We analyze a set of three databases at different levels of aggregation (i) a database of approximately 106 publications of 247 countries in the period between 1980--2001. (ii) A database of 508 academic institutions from European Union (EU) and 408 institutes from USA in the 11 year period between during 1991--2001. (iii) A database comprising of 2330 Flemish authors in the period 1980--2000. At all levels of aggregation we find that the mean annual growth rates of publications is independent of the number of publications of the various units involved. We also find that the standard deviation of the distribution of annual growth rates decays with the number of publications as a power law with exponent ≈ 0.3. These findings are consistent with those of recent studies of systems such as the size of R&D funding budgets of countries, the research publication volumes of US universities, and the size of business firms.