As an illustration of the variability that this approach to answering
question #1 can give, I replicated Steve's methodology in EBSCO's
Academic Search Premier database, which is much larger than Academic
Search Elite.  I retrieved 202,121 hits and divided that by 3,100
full-text, peer-reviewed journals (to be fair, EBSCO states that this
database includes "more than 3,100 peer-reviewed publications" so this
number isn't exact).  That comes to about 65 articles per title per
year.  Maybe there is another way or method that is more exact?

Steve

-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Black [mailto:blacks@MAIL.STROSE.EDU]
Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2003 9:51 AM
To: SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU
Subject: Re: [SERIALST] Average no. of articles in academic journals

For Question 1, I searched in EBSCOhost's Academic Search Elite,
limiting to full text, peer-reviewed, for 2002, for [blank] in default
fields.  That retrieved 110,168 hits.  The database information claims
that there are 1300 peer-reviewed journals in full text, so that comes
to about 85 articles per title per year.  There are of course caveats &
cautions with using this number, but it's probably a pretty fair
estimate for all disciplines lumped together.  I'd just want to be sure
the professor doesn't want to apply the 85 to any one discipline,
because the count would almost surely be different.

I'll leave Question 2 to some other brave soul.

Steve Black
Reference, Instruction, and Serials Librarian
Neil Hellman Library
The College of Saint Rose
392 Western Ave.
Albany, NY 12203
(518) 458-5494
blacks@mail.strose.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: SERIALST: Serials in Libraries Discussion Forum
[mailto:SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU]On Behalf Of Ann Ercelawn
Sent: Monday, December 01, 2003 3:17 PM
To: SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU
Subject: [SERIALST] Average no. of articles in academic journals

Hello,
A professor here has asked thetwo questions below. Can SERIALST readers
help with this query? Thanks, Ann

>> Question: What is the average number of articles published annually
>> in individual academic journals?  I am interested in an average
>> number per journal over a wide range of journals.
>>
>> Similarly, what is the average page count annually per journal?
>>