Database publishing statistics

The database industry was initiated in the early 1970s by the abstracting and indexing (A&I) or secondary publishers as they converted their print products to computer-readable form. In the 1980s a number of primary publishers followed suit and introduced the first full-text databases—first on magnetic tapes and then on CD-ROMs. CD-ROM was responsible for accelerating the growth of full-text databases. The majority of the early databases were produced by government and not-for-profit organizations. In the mid-1980s the commercial sector started large-scale production of databases and now produces the majority of all publicly available databases. This paper traces the growth of the computer-readable database industry from the 1970s to the present.