The publication rate of scientific papers depends only on the number of scientists

In the fields of physics, astronomy, geophysics, mathematics, and chemistry, the numbers of American papers published depend only on the membership numbers of their scientific societies and not upon improved facilities or instrumental breakthroughs, although those improvements have caused the scientific contents of those papers to be far better in recent decades. In the past 30–35 years there have been no increases in the average annual number of published papers per scientist in those fields.