PARIS: The rate of ground-breaking scientific discoveries and technological innovations is slowing despite an ever-increasing amount of knowledge, according to an analysis released Wednesday of millions of research papers and patents.
While previous research has shown declines in individual fields, this is the first study to “clearly document this decline in disruption across all major fields of science and technology,” said lead author Michael Park.
Park, a doctoral student at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, called disruptive discoveries that “depart from existing theories” and “push an entire scientific field into new territory.”
The researchers assigned an “invalidity score” to 45 million scientific papers from 1945 to 2010 and 3.9 million US patents from 1976 to 2010.
From the beginning of these time ranges, research papers and patents are increasingly likely to reinforce or build on previous knowledge, according to the findings, published in the journal Nature.
The ranking was based on how the papers were cited in other studies five years after publication, assuming that the more disruptive the research, the less its predecessors were cited.
The biggest decline in disruptive research occurred in physical sciences such as physics and chemistry.
“The nature of research is changing” as incremental innovations become more common, said Russell Fink, the study’s senior author.
Burden of knowledge
One theory of decline is that all the “low-hanging fruit” of science has already been plucked.
If this were the case, disruptions in different scientific fields would fall at different rates, Park said.
But instead “their speed and time reductions are pretty consistent across all major sectors,” Park said, pointing out that the low-hanging fruit theory is unlikely to be the culprit.
Instead, the researchers point to what they call “research burden,” which suggests that there is now so much that scientists must learn to specialize in a particular field that they have limitations. There is little time left to advance.
This causes scientists and inventors to “focus on a narrow area of existing knowledge, which leads them to come up with something that reinforces rather than disrupts,” Park said. said
Another reason may be that “there is increasing pressure in academia to publish, publish, publish, because that is the metric by which academics are judged,” he added.
The researchers urged universities and funding agencies to focus more on quality rather than quantity, and consider fully subsidizing year-round holidays to allow academics to read and think more deeply.
“We’re not becoming any less innovative as a species,” Park emphasized, pointing to recent developments, such as the use of mRNA technology in COVID-19 vaccines, or the measurement of gravitational waves in 2015. .
Jerome Lemy, a historian and sociologist of science at France’s CNRS research agency, who was not involved in the research, said it showed that “ultra-specialization” and pressure to publish had increased over the years. Is.
He blamed the global trend of academics “being forced to cut back on their papers” to increase the number of publications they publish, and said this had led to a “decline in research”.
