2001: The growth of climate change science: A scientometric study

Abstract. A quantitative description of the growth of climate change science is presented based on the increase in the number of abstracts of scientific publications dealing with the many aspects of this broad subject. This number now totals 7000 and is doubling every 11 years. The annual rate of publication per author and number of authors per paper in climate change science, 1.75 and 2.5 respectively, were similar to those for scientific publications in general but, based on the U.S. data, the cost per publishing scientist is very high largely because of the sums allocated to satellite pro-grams related to climate change research. The total global cost of current climate change research is estimated at three billion U.S. dollars annually. Two plausible but very different interpretations of the growth curve of climate change research are presented and used to discuss its future. The importance of extra-scientific factors in controlling the growth of climate change studies is emphasized, limiting the predictive value of the scientometric analysis presented. 1