Scientific publications in different branches of science

Different branches of science have their own traditions for publishing research results.

Natural Sciences

  • Natural sciences represent the approach where research is aimed to be published as articles in scientific journals and internationally. International publishing is natural because the topics are universal.

Forestry, Health Sciences, and Other Applied Sciences

  • In forestry and health sciences, the same article-focused publishing method as in natural sciences is followed, although it is also necessary to publish professional information in these fields.

Technology

  • In the field of technology and engineering, mainly articles are published, both in journals and especially in conference proceedings. Some professional publications also appear, which is natural since technology is an applied science. Additionally, it is common to publish patents along with research information.

Humanities

  • In the humanities, traditional books and publishing through domestic publishers are more common than in article-focused fields.

Social Sciences

  • Social sciences fall somewhere between the previous fields in terms of publishing methods. A publication is a way to participate to public discussion and decision making, so domestic publishing with domestic language is expected at least in some of the topics. A typical document type is an article or a report, along with some books.
A table: technology 91, natural sciences 89, health sciences 82, forestry and agriculture 79, social sciences 62, humanities 47.
Percentage of publications as peer-reviwed articles. Data is from Finland 2023. Source: Vipunen.

However, in recent years the pressure to publish in international scientific journals has been increased in all branches of science.

How much is published annually?

By National Science Board, in 2022 approximately 3.3 million scientific articles were published worldwide, either in journals or conference proceedings. The number of publications has increased by nearly 59% over ten years (2012-2022). The growth is fastest in developing countries.

In 2016, China surpassed the United States in the number of publications for the first time. Other major publishing countries include India, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Japan. These six countries already produce more than half of all publications. Finland accounts less than one percent of all publications.

The amount of scientific research and publishing is naturally linked to economic resources, not directly to population size or geography.

World map, where the size of a country is related to number of publications.
Open the site worldmapper.org to see the original image Science papers published 2016 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) that illustrates the share of scientific publishing by different countries.

To do:

  1. Take into account that in multidisciplinary topics you might need diverse sources according to tradition of certain disciplines.

Next page: Defing the search topic.