Counting the Army’s content

About 145,491 pieces since 1888

Crack open any Army journal and you’ll find a range of content. 

While the Chief of Staff of the Army may recommend articles, the most recent Military Review opens with the index, has a note from the editor-in-chief, an advertisement for the Center for Army Lessons Learned, two calls for papers, 13 articles, 1 poem, and 1 review essay. Then, hidden throughout the print version, the reader can find other content not advertised in the index. I found an advertisement for the Army Learning Symposium hidden on page 36, a call for papers for the Journal of Military Learning on page 45, advertisements for new monographs and movies on page 55 and 56, an advertisement for staff rides on page 91, another call for papers on page 129, a call for book reviews on page 143, an obituary for former Chief of Staff of the Army Gordon Sullivan on page 144, and a short piece honoring Medal of Honor winner Col. Roger H.C. Donlon on the final pages. Articles may dominate as the content type by number of articles and pages, but the Army’s journals—as shown by this issue of Military Review—contain a ton of different content. 

This piece estimates there are about 145,491 pieces of Army content published between 1888 and 2024—about 120,000 of which are online today. Content is all of the types of material present in a branch magazine. The median issue will likely contain an index, note from the branch commandant, a number of articles, perhaps some book reviews or notes about foreign militaries, and a back page. While articles are a preponderance of the content published, the Army’s journals also publish a wide variety of other content. 

As the Army makes its back content more accessible, the Army must decide what content is archived with complete metadata tagging and what is not. This seems simple, but is tricky in execution. For example, is a poem printed alongside an article on tanks broken out as a separate piece? Should each book review get a separate entry, or should they be rolled up into one consolidated collection of book reviews? Some of these decisions can be made ahead of time, but others will be made by the technicians working with the archived issues. However, a rough count is necessary to ensure the Army hires an adequate number of archivists for this project. 

The count

This piece focuses on the number of pieces of content. The most laborious part of archiving content is the metadata tagging, so the number of pieces is more important than their length or other measures. Each content piece requires similar amounts of metadata no matter the piece’s length in words or pages. 

My goal was a rough estimate. To develop the estimate, I categorized and counted the number of pieces of content in 12 Army articles.¹ While 12 issues is not a large number to code, they were consistent enough across issues for my purposes.

The figure below depicts the number of pieces of content by issue. The red line is the mean number of pieces of content and the dotted red line one standard deviation above and below the mean. 

In all, I estimate the Army published 145,491 pieces of content between 1888 and 2024. This estimate is based on my previous estimate of the number of issues published over the same time period multiplied by the number of pieces of content per issue found in the research for this post. In “Finding the Army’s Articles” I estimated that the Army had published 5,728 issues with 5,192 available online. In the research for this post, I found a median number of content pieces of 21.5 per issue, a mean of 25.4, a standard deviation of 9.7, and a range of 17 to 47. Given that only 5,192 issues are available online, this suggests archivists will need to split and apply metadata to between 81,514 and 182,239 pieces of content with the most likely number around 120,000.

Unlocking a sizable store

Knowing there are about 120,000 pieces of content online today suggests the Army will unlock a sizable store of professional thought. It also allows the Army to plan for the amount of archival work required. In order to archive articles individually, archivists will need to split the scanned versions into about 25 pieces of content per issue. They will then need to tag each issue with metadata on the author, the publication, the date, and other data that improve search functionality. These unlocked articles can then be used by students and other authors to strengthen the Army profession.

In a future post, we’ll dive deep into the types of content and explore how renewed Army journals can cultivate communities with the right content.

1. I reviewed and hand coded each piece of content in these randomly selected Army journal issues: Engineer vol. 10 issue 3 (1980), Infantry vol. 82 issue 3 (1993), The Army Lawyer 2023 issue 1, Aviation Digest vol. 5 issue 1 (2017), Field Artillery vol. 43 issue 2 (1975), Armor vol. 61 issue 2 (1951), Military Review vol. 43 issue 9 (1963), Military Review vol. 24 issue 2 (1943), Army Sustainment vol. 12 issue 6 (1980), Infantry Journal vol. 32 issue 6 (1928), Special Warfare vol. 26 issue 1 (2013), and Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin vol. 10 issue 3 (1984).