Number of articles on arXiv
Published:
Since 2017 or 2018, I only post my working papers on arXiv because it is free, open to anyone (they need a referral for initial submission, though), users can download the source file, and version control is straightforward. I see no value for SSRN, though it seems to be still popular among economists. An added bonus of arXiv is that if you use Overleaf, there is an option to submit to arXiv, so the submission process is (mostly) painless.
Out of curiosity, I wanted to know how many articles arXiv publishes by year and field. It was easy to get these statistics. For instance, for economics, you can go to https://arxiv.org/archive/econ and click “Article statistics by year”.
The graph below shows the number of articles in mathematics (math), computer science (cs), physics (physics), statistics (stat), and economics (econ). Here are a few observations.
- Mathematics, physics, and statistics seem to have a common trend.
- Computer science was not special until around 2004, but since then the number of articles is growing much faster than other fields.
- Economics is still very small but is growing more rapidly than other fields (except computer science).
- There seems to be a slight increase in the number of articles in 2020, likely because people had more time to do research during the pandemic or because it became popular to write papers on COVID.
