Changes Between 2005 and 2010 in Academic Publications -- Numbers, Acceptances, Rejections. (June 7, 2010)

Thomson Reuters has placed online its Global Publishing: Changes in submission trends and the impact on scholarly publishers, a 10-pqge compendium of statistics on submissions of scholarly manuscripts for publication: "The aggregate dataset for analysis includes submissions, acceptances, rejections, and time-to-decision for 4,200 journals published by over 365 societies, publishers, and university presses. This encompasses over 3 million submissions during the analysis period 2005–2010. The final year of analysis, 2010, was chosen since this is the most recent year where the majority of final decisions will have been made at the time of writing. All trends indicated persist into 2011 data."

The chart and two tables below give a summary of the changes that have taken place. Click on the link above to download the full analysis. Perhaps the strongest take home messages are: 1) the huge increase in publications over the period, 2) the relative increase of the proportion of submissions from  China and India, 3) The implied strain on peer review by scholarly publications and 4) the wide range in acceptance rates of manuscripts from the nations represented in Table 4.