  Growth of science is a prevalent issue in science of science studies. In
recent years, two new bibliographic databases have been introduced which can be
used to study growth processes in science from centuries back: Dimensions from
Digital Science and Microsoft Academic. In this study, we used publication data
from these new databases and added publication data from two established
databases (Web of Science from Clarivate Analytics and Scopus from Elsevier) to
investigate scientific growth processes from the beginning of the modern
science system until today. We estimated regression models that included
simultaneously the publication counts from the four databases. The results of
the unrestricted growth of science calculations show that the overall growth
rate amounts to 4.02% with a doubling time of 16.8 years. As the comparison of
various segmented regression models in the current study revealed, the model
with five segments fits the publication data best. We demonstrated that these
segments with different growth rates can be interpreted very well, since they
are related to either phases of economic (e.g., industrialization) and / or
political developments (e.g., Second World War). In this study, we additionally
analyzed scientific growth in two broad fields and the relationship of
scientific and economic growth in UK. We focused on this country, since
long-time series for publication counts and economic growth indices were
available.
