Abstract

The objective of this paper is to carry out an inferential statistical analysis of the growth of literature published by Brazilian researchers on Knowledge Organization and Representation (KOR) from 1972 to 2021. It presents a review of studies on growth of literature and explores proposed models to measure this growth. Articles published in academic journals, book chapters, and papers presented at conferences that dealt with some aspects of Knowledge Organization and Representation were collected in a comprehensive list of databases and websites, and a database was created in EndNote X8. The collected literature was analyzed considering the exponential growth model and the epidemic model. It was found 3,630 articles produced by 2,535 different researchers, most of which were congresses papers (53.3%), followed by journal papers (35.2%), and book chapters (5%). Portuguese was the language of 89.5% of the texts, with publications in English, Spanish, and French. Considering only authors, 20 are the most productive and account for 5% of the total number of authors researching and publishing in the field. It is since the year 2000 that the publication begins to grow exponentially, 10.3% of this literature was published in the first 30 years and 67.2% was published in the last 10 years. This literature is growing exponentially at a rate of 12.2% per year, doubling its volume every six years, and has not reached yet its saturation point.

Keywords
Scientific communication; Statistical analysis of the literature; Brazilian scientific literature; Knowledge Organization and Representation