There’s an article in Nature by Max Kozlov that quantifies something I have been saying here for some time. The pace of scientific breakthroughs has declined sharply:
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.
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.â€
The author is basically at a loss to explain what has happened. Here are some possible causes:
- We’ve picked the low-hanging fruit
- Research organizations are larger and more bureaucratic than they used to be
- The cost of producing new breakthroughs increases exponentially and we aren’t willing to spend as much as is necessary to produce them faster
Whatever the reason it’s a reality. Don’t expect technological progress to save your pet plan. Elaborations will come but don’t expect breakthroughs.
Notice the chart at the top of this page. Breakthroughs in the physical and life sciences are on the floor and in technology and the social sciences not far behind.
In a sense that’s encouraging. If you’re adhering faithfully to the scientific method, it’s exactly what you’d expect.
I think this is key from the article.
” Although the proportion of disruptive research dropped significantly between 1945 and 2010, the number of highly disruptive studies has remained about the same. ”
What has massively increased is the number of journals where you can publish. A lot of them are online journals and moms tof those are not peer reviewed. For a lot of them you get published by paying to publish. So the very huge majority of the drop you see in the graph is an artifact of how many papers are now published. (You can actually publish faster now also with everything on computers now. You dont have to write by hand or use a typewriter.
There are also many more confirmation papers than we had in the past. As you know, when looked at we have not been able to replicate many papers. Now we actually do that, sometimes, and those papers arent going to be spectacular. Just look at all fo the dozens of papers done to show that vaccines are safe, from all over the world and many different research groups including private insurance records.
However, the world has grown. Maybe we are under-producing a bit, but IIRC commenters elsewhere have noted, and I think one of the authors conceded, we have had a recent surge so maybe its cyclical.
Steve