Editors’ Afterword

There are approximately 23,000 scholarly journals in the world, collectively publishing 1.4 million articles a year. The number of articles published each year and the number of journals have both grown steadily for over two centuries, by about 3% and 3.5% per year, respectively. The reason is the equally persistent growth in the number of researchers, which has also grown at about 3% per year and now stands at around 5.5 million. (p. 3)