Knowledge · Biomedical Literature

Annual Biomedical Papers (PubMed)

Three papers per minute, every minute, year-round. The publishing curve underneath every clinical decision.

• ~21× growth since 1950
• Flat near 1.6M/yr to 2024, +9% in 2025
• 1950s counts come from a partial index
• Some papers double-counted across years

PubMed indexes biomedical literature from over 5,200 journals worldwide, dating back to 1946. Annual published papers grew from 85,744 in 1950 to 1,766,605 in 2025, a ~21× expansion. Output flattened after the COVID surge, holding near 1.6 million a year through 2024, then rose about 9% in 2025, the largest annual rise since the pandemic years of 2020–21. The COVID-19 pandemic alone added about 183,000 papers across 2020 and 2021, more than twice PubMed’s entire 1950 journal-article count. The expansion reflects the globalisation of science (by NSF’s count of science and engineering papers, China has out-published the United States since 2016), the shift to digital-first journals, and the growing intersection between biology and computation.

Figures are counts of journal articles by date of publication, queried from PubMed directly; publication dates include both print and electronic dates, so a small share of articles is counted in two adjacent years. The earliest counts are low partly by construction: PubMed’s pre-1966 records come from NLM’s OLDMEDLINE, which omits one of that era’s print indexes, and NLM says a hand search is still needed to cover 1946–1956 fully. Part of the ~21× since 1950 is the index filling in, not only publishing growing. No human can read more than a fraction of it, which is why literature search has itself become an AI problem.

Source: NCBI PubMed (journal articles by date of publication)

Download the data: pubmed_papers.csv · pubmed_papers.json

All curves · The chart is drawn in your browser and needs JavaScript. Every number it plots is in the table above.