We always hear about the increasing number of publications published every year and the resulting information overload in science. I wanted to show this trend to students to highlight why they should care about information literacy and search strategies. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a reliable source that highlights this trend, e.g. in an easy understandable figure.
I searched for publications including this information and even hoped for Web of Science or Google Scholar to publish this information but couldn't find anything useful. It is not that important what kinds of publication types are included, e.g. only journal articles or all kinds of publications.
Has anyone a reliable and relatively easy to understand source highlighting the trend of increasing global number of publications over time?
Answer
I found an archived version of the 2018 MTS Report. Among other statistics, it has this plot of the scientific output from 1975-2018 and four different databases:
The Web of Science (WoS) line looks rather similar to the earlier results of Bornmann and Mutz (2014), who produced this figure for 1980-2012 using a copy of WoS' database:
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