‘Disruptive’ science has declined — and no one knows why

Over the past few decades, the number of science and technology research papers has increased, but the disruptiveness of those papers has decreased.

In comparison to the mid-twentieth century, research done in the 2000s was more likely to push science forward than to stop working. The trends from 1976 to 2010 were the same.

Russell Funk, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and a co-author of the analysis, said that the data suggests something is changing. You don't have as much of a breakthrough discovery intensity as you used to.

Telltale citations

If a study was disruptive, subsequent research would be less likely to cite the study's references. The CD index is a measure of disruptiveness based on the citation data from 45 million manuscripts and 3.9 million patents.

Between 1945 and 2010 the average CD index declined by more than 90 percent for research manuscripts and by more than 80 percent for patents. Even though there were potential differences in factors such as citation practices, disruptiveness declined in all of the analysed fields.

The authors looked at the most common verbs used in manuscripts and found that they were more likely to refer to incremental progress in the 2010s than they were in the 1950s.

Dashun Wang is a computational social scientist who studies disruptiveness in science. They look at this in many different ways, and I think it's convincing.

Yian Yin, also a computational social scientist, says that other research suggests that scientific innovation has slowed. A data-driven way to investigate how science changes is offered by this study.

Incremental science is not necessarily bad. He says that the first direct observation of the waves was revolutionary.

John Walsh is a specialist in science and technology policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology It might be a good thing to have more reproduction and replication in a world that is concerned with the validity of findings.

Why the slide?

Walsh says that it's important to understand the reasons for the change. Changes in the scientific enterprise may be to blame. There are more researchers than in the 1940s, which has created a more competitive environment and raised the stakes to publish research. Incentives for how researchers go about their work have changed as a result of that. According to Wang and his colleagues, large research teams are more likely to produce small changes than disruptive science.

It will be difficult to find an explanation for the decline. Between 1945 and 2010, the proportion of disruptive research decreased, but the number of highly disruptive studies has not. The rate of decline from 1945 to 1970 is puzzling. He says that levelling off in the 2000s is an explanation for the drop in disruptiveness.