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Chet Ensign asked for good statistics on the explosion in information
over the past decades. I've got several great sources, but you'll have
to make a trip to the university library to get the data. Here's one
example:
Abstracting journals, such as Forestry Abstracts (produced by the
Commonwealth Agricultural Bureau International, CABI), receive copies
of most major technical journals and other published materials in a
given field. They then trim out the abstract (hence the name) or
executive summary, paste it into their registry, and publish monthly
updates on what's new in that field.
As a result, these journals provide a really good snapshot of changes
in the volume of printed information... not a final or accurate
picture, just a real good look at the trend. If you take the numbers
of abstracts included in each year's compilation, you can plot a
really scary graph. For Foresty Abstracts, there were 2556 entries in
the 1950 volume, versus 9345 in the 1993 volume! To put this in
perspective, assume that you'd spend 5 minutes reading and pondering
each abstract (to think about the context and implications, think
whether you want to order the journal to read the article, etc.) in a
vain effort to keep up to date on your specific field of expertise:
this amounts to 780 hours of reading, 2 hours per day each day in the
year, or 97 full 8-hour days. (Scale down this figure depending onhow
fast you read,how little you think, etc.) Forestry is a much smaller
field than, say, engineering or biology. Last I checked, Biological
Abstracts contained something like 10 times as many entries, or a
mind-boggling 970 days of reading per 365-day year. Ouch! Talk about
your "eye-popping" statistics.
In addition to Forestry Abstracts, you can get Biological Abstracts,
several forms of Engineering Abstracts, and several Medical Abstracts,
depending on the faculties available at your university. Have fun
researching this!
--Geoff Hart #8^{)}
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Disclaimer: These comments are my own and don't represent the opinions
of the Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada.
