Mining the archives: a hundred years of changing attitudes to growth and development

Over the past 100 years, many important papers relating to growth and development have been published in <i>Archives</i> The aims of the study were to quantify time trends of such papers based on title keywords: to summarise them in terms of their citation counts and to highlight the top 10 most highly cited growth and development papers. Several patterns emerged: a rising then falling trend in papers referring to 'growth', the heyday being the 1960s to the 1990s, a rising trend in 'obesity', and many of the papers being highly cited. In the list of all <i>Archives</i> articles ranked by citations, growth and development topics fill the top five slots, and 10 of the top 16. This confirms the importance attached by the profession to research into growth and development.