Innovation in Science Is on The Decline And We're Not Sure Why

Despite a growing amount of knowledge, the rate of ground-breaking scientific discoveries and technological innovation is slowing down.

The study is the first to document the decline of disruptiveness in all major fields of science and technology.

Park is a PhD student at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management.

45 million scientific papers from 1945 to 2010 were given a disruptiveness score by the researchers.

According to results published in the journal Nature, research papers and patents have become more likely to consolidate or build upon previous knowledge from the beginning.

The ranking was based on how the papers were cited in other studies five years after they were published.

Physical sciences had the largest decrease in disruptive research.

As innovations become more common, the nature of research is changing.

Burden of knowledge

The decline is thought to be due to the fact that all the "low-hanging fruit" of science has been plucked.

Disruption in scientific fields would fall at different speeds if that were the case.

The researchers pointed to the fact that scientists have little time left to push boundaries because of the amount of research.

Park said that this causes scientists and inventors to focus on a narrow slice of the knowledge, leading them to come up with something more consolidation rather than disruption.

It's possible that there's increasing pressure in academia to publish because that's the metric that academics are assessed on.

Full subsidies for year-long sabbaticals to allow academics to read and think more deeply was called for by the researchers.

"We're not getting any less innovative as a species," Park said, pointing to recent discoveries such as the use of mRNA technology in vaccines and the measurement of waves in 2015.

The researcher who was not involved in the research said it showed that the pressure to publish had increased over the years.

He blamed a global trend of academics being forced to slice up their papers to increase their number of publications.

Agence France- Presse.