[The proportion of publications that send a field in a new
direction has plummeted over the past half-century.]
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‘DISRUPTIVE’ SCIENCE HAS DECLINED — AND NO ONE KNOWS WHY
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Max Kozlov
January 4, 2023
Nature [[link removed]]
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_ The proportion of publications that send a field in a new direction
has plummeted over the past half-century. _
The proportion of disruptive scientific papers, such as the 1953
description of DNA’s double-helix structure, has fallen since the
mid-1940s., Lawrence Lawry/SPL
The number of science and technology research papers published has
skyrocketed over the past few decades — but the ‘disruptiveness’
of those papers has dropped, according to an analysis of how radically
papers depart from the previous literature1
[[link removed]].
Data from millions of manuscripts show that, compared with the
mid-twentieth century, research done in the 2000s was much more likely
to incrementally push science forward than to veer off in a new
direction and render previous work obsolete. Analysis of patents from
1976 to 2010 showed the same trend.
“The data suggest something is changing,” says Russell Funk, a
sociologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and a
co-author of the analysis, which was published on 4 January
in _Nature_. “You don’t have quite the same intensity of
breakthrough discoveries you once had.”
Telltale citations
The authors reasoned that if a study was highly disruptive, subsequent
research would be less likely to cite the study’s references, and
instead cite the study itself. Using the citation data from 45 million
manuscripts and 3.9 million patents, the researchers calculated a
measure of disruptiveness, called the ‘CD index’, in which values
ranged from –1 for the least disruptive work to 1 for the most
disruptive.
The average CD index declined by more than 90% between 1945 and 2010
for research manuscripts (see ‘Disruptive science dwindles’), and
by more than 78% from 1980 to 2010 for patents. Disruptiveness
declined in all of the analysed research fields and patent types, even
when factoring in potential differences in factors such as citation
practices.
Source: Ref. 1
The authors also analysed the most common verbs used in manuscripts
and found that whereas research in the 1950s was more likely to use
words evoking creation or discovery such as ‘produce’ or
‘determine’, that done in the 2010s was more likely to refer to
incremental progress, using terms such as ‘improve’ or
‘enhance’.
“It’s great to see this [phenomenon] documented in such a
meticulous manner,” says Dashun Wang, a computational social
scientist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who
studies disruptiveness in science. “They look at this in 100
different ways, and I find it very convincing overall.”
Other research2
[[link removed]] has
suggested that scientific innovation has slowed in recent decades,
too, says Yian Yin, also a computational social scientist at
Northwestern. But this study offers a “new start to a data-driven
way to investigate how science changes”, he adds.
Disruptiveness is not inherently good, and incremental science is not
necessarily bad, says Wang. The first direct observation of
gravitational waves, for example, was both revolutionary and the
product of incremental science, he says.
The ideal is a healthy mix of incremental and disruptive research,
says John Walsh, a specialist in science and technology policy at the
Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. “In a world where
we’re concerned with the validity of findings, it might be a good
thing to have more replication and reproduction,” he says.
Why the slide?
It is important to understand the reasons for the drastic changes,
Walsh says. The trend might stem in part from changes in the
scientific enterprise. For example, there are now many more
researchers than in the 1940s, which has created a more competitive
environment and raised the stakes to publish research and seek
patents. That, in turn, has changed the incentives for how researchers
go about their work. Large research teams, for example, have become
more common, and Wang and his colleagues have found3
[[link removed]] that big
teams are more likely to produce incremental than disruptive science.
Finding an explanation for the decline won’t be easy, Walsh says.
Although the proportion of disruptive research dropped significantly
between 1945 and 2010, the number of highly disruptive studies has
remained about the same. The rate of decline is also puzzling: CD
indices fell steeply from 1945 to 1970, then more gradually from the
late 1990s to 2010. “Whatever explanation you have for
disruptiveness dropping off, you need to also make sense of it
levelling off” in the 2000s, he says.
_doi: [link removed]
References
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Park, M., Leahey, E. & Funk, R. J. _Nature_ 613, 138–144 (2023).
Article [[link removed]] Google Scholar
[[link removed].]
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Cowen, T. & Southwood, B. Preprint at
SSRN [link removed] (2019).
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Wu, L., Wang, D. & Evans, J. A. _Nature_ 566, 378–382 (2019).
Article [[link removed]] PubMed
[[link removed]] Google
Scholar
[[link removed].]
_As a kid, MAX KOZLOV was dead set on one day becoming the next famous
meteorologist [[link removed]] or
pharmacist._
_He was fascinated by trips to the Museum of Science in Boston
[[link removed]], where he could pretend to be a scientist even
though he couldn't speak English well, as his entire family moved to
the Boston area from Ukraine a few years before he was born.
Admittedly, Max is obsessed with his babushka’s borscht._
_All through high school and into college, Max worked at the Museum of
Science teaching science in the very same exhibit he once visited as a
child. His favorite part of the job: putting on a giant bee costume
[[link removed]] and pretending to buzz around
like a bee with young visitors to teach them how bees make honey._
_He studied cognitive neuroscience at Brown University as a first-gen
student. After graduating, Max was awarded the 2020 AAAS Mass Media
Fellowship [[link removed]],
where he covered science at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch._
_Today, he writes for Nature as a life-sciences reporter._
_His work has also appeared in The Atlantic, Quanta Magazine, The
Scientist, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Behavioral Scientist, and The
Public’s Radio._
_In his free time, he loves to rock climb, participate in research
studies, and devour just about every journalistic piece he comes
across._
_To this day, he's still fascinated by the weather and medicine and,
who knows, hopefully he’s making childhood Max proud by writing
about science._
_Follow Max on Twitter [[link removed]] to stay
up-to-date on his latest stories._
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