This page displays the number of entries (articles) in PubMed (Medline) published every year, that conform to search strategy (such as a phrase) you enter.
If this is unstoppable, then whatever the timescale the alarm bell has to ring and businesses (not just publishers — including universities) have to accept that change is inevitable and plan quite carefully to deal with it.
One way to try to get a handle on what's happening in a scientific field is to study citations in research papers. n a visualization of a complex network with many links, however, it can be very difficult to recognize significant patterns amid the clutter