Science isn't as disruptive as it used to be. Now we need to understand why

[Alfonso Maruccia]

Why it matters: Is science better when it disrupts or when there are just incremental improvements to previous knowledge? The topic was analyzed in a recent study, and it seems that researchers have spent these past years improving things rather than trying to revolutionize everything.

According to a study by Russell Funk, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, data suggests that the level of "disruptiveness" in scientific research has gone way down in the 2000s compared to the last half-century.

Funk and colleagues focused on citation data taken from 45 million manuscripts and 3.9 million patents that were published between 1976 and 2010. If a study was highly disruptive, the authors said, subsequent research would be less likely to cite the study's references as they would just cite the study itself.

The researchers used citation data to calculate a new measure of disruptiveness, which they named "CD index," with values ranging from -1 (the least disruptive work) to 1 (most disruptive). The study claims that the average CD index suffered a sharp decline of more than 90% between 1945 and 2010, and more than 78% between 1980 and 2010.

The study takes the potential differences in citation practices and other factors existing among different research fields and patent types into account, highlighting how the apparent decline in disruptiveness seems to involve every kind of research and scientific work.

The study also took into account the most common verbs used in manuscripts, uncovering how words which evoke creation or fundamental discovery ("produce," "determine," etc.) were more likely used in the 1950s than in the 2010s. In recent years, researchers preferred words highlighting incremental progress like "improve" or "enhance."

Previous studies already suggested that scientific innovation has slowed in recent decades, but the new work by Funk and colleagues follows a data-driven approach while looking at the trend. Yian Yin, a computational social scientist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, highlights how disruptiveness is not inherently good, and incremental science is not necessarily bad.

Yin cites the first direct observation of gravitational waves, a landmark discovery that was both revolutionary and the product of incremental science. Ideally, a "healthy" scientific progress would provide a mix of both incremental and disruptive research. John Walsh, a specialist in science and technology policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, said that "in a world where we're concerned with the validity of findings, it might be a good thing to have more replication and reproduction."

As for the reasons behind the decline in disruptive index in science research, the study doesn't offer definitive answers yet. Potential explanations include a much larger number of researchers working today compared to the 1940s, or larger research teams which are more common today and are more likely to produce incremental than disruptive science.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/97174-science-isnt-disruptive-used-now-need-understand-why.html

 

[fadingfool]

One reason - peer review gate keepers. The current paradigms are consciously and unconsciously protected by the peer review system - journals won't publish anything that goes against the grain (famous example being from the CRU leaked emails "Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is").

 

[Makste]

I appreciate the article. It is mentally pleasing that these researchers thought about, and even assigned a value to the disruption of science over the years.

Indeed...if so many people are scientists now, the numerous discoveries they make each day may not be considered as disruptive because the findings they make are quickly and almost seemlessly intergrated into existing findings.
Take covid-19 for example and all the vaccines which were made for it. Compare it to HIV-2 in terms of disruptiveness in their respective times of discovery.
The HIV-2 discovery may have been considered more disruptive given the time than the covid-19 was in 2019, because fewer scientists were engaged in HIV research as compared to those who simultaneously got involved with covid-19 research in 2019 and beyond.

 

[MaXtor]

"Science isn't as disruptive as it used to be. Now we need to understand why."

Could it be that science is no longer allowed to be questioned? I grew up learning that science was meant to be scrutinized, ensuring that the same result could be independently replicated any number of times. Now we have "scientific consensus" ensuring that any scientist willing to scrutinize the "consensus" is ignored, ridiculed and can even have their career threatened. We no longer promote science, instead we promote group think and propaganda.

 

[McKocoa]

Every field is probably a little different. In my field I am seeing a lot of rehashed old research from 30-40 years ago being repeated and retried. It's sort of maddening. "We tried that 30 years ago and it didn't work".
Another poster commented on the peer review process which does gate-keep a lot of published literature if you go against the reviewer's school of thought. Also, Science and Nature (the two big ones) in my view have devolved into a social virtue signaling endeavor both in their content and editorial decisions, not a good development. In the 21st century we need more people to (at least able to) read scientific literature instead not social media, yet I find that unlikely to happen.

 

[Tams80]

Almost all the low-hanging fruit has gone.

For most of our specie's existence, we have barely been scratching on what has been possible. But in the last 100-200 years breakthroughs have been made that have start to discover how things work. But now... while there is much left to discover, the vast majority of it takes vast amounts of resources and skill (often teamwork) to unravel.

 

[psycros]

One reason - peer review gate keepers. The current paradigms are consciously and unconsciously protected by the peer review system - journals won't publish anything that goes against the grain (famous example being from the CRU leaked emails "Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is").

You mean like how the quack in charge of the government's infectious disease response is married to the woman who greenlights most government-funded medical research? Careful, you might get a visit from the FBI.

 

[nodfor]

When you want to invent, you first have to learn what is already known in the field, so you don't end up reinventing the wheel.
This means that researchers have to learn more things compared to previous ages
At the same time unis (at least in the west) are busy promoting woke values, and sucking dry the gov tit, either directly (research funding, state unis etc) or indirectly (gov paid student loans...)
So when they are actually more needed than ever to promote free thinking - research spirit and be more rigorous in their efforts, they do the exact opposite...

End result - research is increasingly done by private enterprise but with a focus on profitable applications, meaning narrow focus and patents, secrecy and sometimes quackery to trick customers and investors

 

[wiyosaya]

"Science isn't as disruptive as it used to be. Now we need to understand why."

Could it be that science is no longer allowed to be questioned? I grew up learning that science was meant to be scrutinized, ensuring that the same result could be independently replicated any number of times. Now we have "scientific consensus" ensuring that any scientist willing to scrutinize the "consensus" is ignored, ridiculed and can even have their career threatened. We no longer promote science, instead we promote group think and propaganda.

It is interesting how this comment is tainted by political viewpoint. Science is still questioned by scientists in their respective fields and by researchers themselves. In fact, that was a primary principle of good/great science that Richard Feynman promoted. That is what science is. Science is not just posting some BS on a social forum and saying its true without any verifiable proof, however, from my standpoint, many people in this day and age have mistaken BS posted on social media for science. For the most part, that social BS is simply conspiracy theory or outright unsubstantiated crap. Anything published to a peer-reviewed journal is, technically, out there in the public domain for anyone to recreate the experiment and verify - or disprove.

Just because some joker says something is true does not make it so. Carl Sagan's saying "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" comes to mind.

You mean like how the quack in charge of the government's infectious disease response is married to the woman who greenlights most government-funded medical research? Careful, you might get a visit from the FBI.

Speaking of conspiracy theory - correlation does not equal causation.

Almost all the low-hanging fruit has gone.

For most of our species existence, we have barely been scratching on what has been possible. But in the last 100-200 years breakthroughs have been made that have start to discover how things work. But now... while there is much left to discover, the vast majority of it takes vast amounts of resources and skill (often teamwork) to unravel.

Agreed.

Disruptive science can still occur even if it goes against the grain of accepted science. Everyone who was behind disruptive science in the past met the same kind of "mainstream science" resistance - even Einstein did. When Einstein first published his theory of relativity, it was scoffed at by mainstream scientists at the time. https://bigthink.com/the-past/einstein-critics The thing is, Einstein stood the test of time.

Another modern-day example is Lucid Dreaming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_dream Lucid Dreaming is when you are asleep and dreaming and know that you are dreaming. Two researchers in the 1970's independently gathered irrefutable scientific evidence that people can and do realize that they are dreaming while they are dreaming. Only one of the researchers tried to publish their work in peer-reviewed journals, but several of them rejected his submissions because it was "thought" that being able to recognize that you are dreaming while you are dreaming is impossible. Now, 50-years later, Lucid Dreaming is accepted as well within the realm of possibility by the scientific community. The interesting thing is that some religions have known about and experienced Lucid Dreaming for centuries.

 

[Thanthan]

Isn’t this exactly what one would expect? As time goes on an our knowledge of how stuff works becomes more and more fleshed out it becomes more and more difficult to move the needle?

Also there are a thousandfold more things published these days, much more so than population growth (although that’s not taking into account increased education access, as I can’t be bothered researching for a tech spot post), and, if we accept that people are no more intelligent now than earlier, it stands to reason that the percentage of disruptive papers would decrease as scientific research becomes more of a day job, and less the domain of but the brightest. Personally I’m all for that change as lots of optimisation by competent, if not brilliant, people, isn’t exactly going to make our world worse is it? And those brilliant people will probably still think of something cool during their time with us on earth xD

 

[MaXtor]

It is interesting how this comment is tainted by political viewpoint.

I disagree, I grew up apolitical but believing I was a liberal with the mantra of "live and let live." So when I began voting I voted liberal, then the tides turned and conservatives became more about liberty and I voted conservative. Now I'm neither side. F politics, they're two sides of the same coin.

Get away from politics, turn off the television. They're playing you, it's all propaganda.

 

[trieste1s]

I disagree, I grew up apolitical but believing I was a liberal with the mantra of "live and let live." So when I began voting I voted liberal, then the tides turned and conservatives became more about liberty and I voted conservative. Now I'm neither side. F politics, they're two sides of the same coin.

Get away from politics, turn off the television. They're playing you, it's all propaganda.

Aren't there other parties that you can vote for besides Rep and Dem?

 

[Fobus]

Isn't this exactly what you would see if science has been mostly right? One you zero in on fundamental aspect of reality, new discoveries or probing deeper layers may take thousands of people collaborating over decades or even centuries. So what's left is tinkering around the edges, eeking out improvements.

It's unrealistic to expect the pace of discoveries of the last 500 years to continue.

 

[Q Wales]

The word Visible is missing from the beginning of the Title

 

[wiyosaya]

I disagree, I grew up apolitical but believing I was a liberal with the mantra of "live and let live." So when I began voting I voted liberal, then the tides turned and conservatives became more about liberty and I voted conservative. Now I'm neither side. F politics, they're two sides of the same coin.

Get away from politics, turn off the television. They're playing you, it's all propaganda.

I follow my heart. And I disagree. Disruptive science has always garnered criticism throughout the ages. Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Da Vinci, etc. It's no different now than it has been throughout the ages. People may only think that its harder to make a mark in science these days because there are people out there saying that this is the case. Just because others say something is so, does not make it so. That is what propaganda is - people wanting others to believe something that is not necessarily true and that has been almost exclusively within the domain of politics as I see it.

 

[nugnamnivek]

Isn't this exactly what you would see if science has been mostly right? One you zero in on fundamental aspect of reality, new discoveries or probing deeper layers may take thousands of people collaborating over decades or even centuries. So what's left is tinkering around the edges, eeking out improvements.

It's unrealistic to expect the pace of discoveries of the last 500 years to continue.

I don't know about that... The idea that we know more about the universe than we don't know is pretty absurd in my opinion. As a species we have a problem, seen all throughout civilization, where we overestimate our handle on reality. There will be a periods of time where our ability to test the world around us is limited due to the technology available to us, but when new incredible technologies emerge as we've seen in the past few decades we should be seeing equally incredible data come out of it...no matter if it confirms past understandings or challenges them. The problem, the human problem, is that the majority of humans are afraid to challenge the status quo due to the ridicule they could face. Graham Hancock is a good example. He's simply using new data to just SUGGEST potential changes to the status quo and the majority has been trying to cancel his ability to even speak for decades. If we can't postulate, then what's the point of any of this?

 

[Inthenstus]

To many SJW scientist trying to be politically correct and not offend anyone is the biggest factor

 

[ScottSoapbox]

Low hanging fruit is gone.

You used to be able to publish a correlation table as definitive proof. Now you need to use complex statistics and control for everything else we already know. Which is a lot. We know a LOT more than we did in the 50s.

 

[neeyik]

If anyone is interested in reading more about the math behind the CD index used in the research covered in this news article, you can find the research paper for it here.

Low hanging fruit is gone.

The researchers suggest that this isn't the cause. They go through a number of potential causes:

...our results are not consistent with explanations that link slowing innovative activity to diminishing ‘low-hanging fruit’...the decline in disruptiveness is unlikely to be due to other field-specific factors by decomposing variation in CD5 attributable to field, author and year effects.

Declining rates of disruptive activity are unlikely to be caused by the diminishing quality of science and technology. If they were, then the patterns seen should be less visible in high-quality work. However, when we restrict our sample to articles published in premier publication venues such as Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Science, or to Nobel-winning discoveries, the downward trend persists.

Furthermore, the trend is not driven by characteristics of the WoS and UPSTO data or our particular derivation of the CD index; we observe similar declines in disruptiveness when we compute CD5 on papers in JSTOR, the American Physical Society corpus, Microsoft Academic Graph and PubMed (Methods).

We further show that the decline is not an artefact of the CD index by reporting similar patterns using alternative derivations. Declines in disruptiveness are also not attributable to changing publication, citation or authorship practices

The researchers suggest the following as the contributing factor behind the decline in disruptive research papers and patents:

The decline represents a substantive shift in science and technology, one that reinforces concerns about slowing innovative activity. We attribute this trend in part to scientists’ and inventors’ reliance on a narrower set of existing knowledge.

To promote disruptive science and technology, scholars may be encouraged to read widely and given time to keep up with the rapidly expanding knowledge frontier. Universities may forgo the focus on quantity, and more strongly reward research quality, and perhaps more fully subsidize year-long sabbaticals. Federal agencies may invest in the riskier and longer-term individual awards that support careers and not simply specific, giving scholars the gift of time needed to step outside the fray, inoculate themselves from the publish or perish culture, and produce truly consequential work.

 

[Hodor]

The answer is simple:

Long time ago it was decided that publicly available science should be stopped and derailed. Money rerouted to stupid research. So that peasants (aka, us) don't have access to advanced science. Especially in biology, medicine, energy production, weather modification, fundamental physics, and a few other areas.

That's why "peers are blocking the advance" and "science is not allowed to be questioned". Only the top dogs can access real science. For the rest of us there's this censored crappy version that solves zero problems. It just creates new ones.

 

[shark975]

Because the BIG low hanging fruit (electricity, air flight, medical advances such as antibiotics and surgery, radio/tv broadcasts, space travel, nuclear etc) has been discovered. Now it is more as noted, incremental. I dont know that its anybodys fault.

sometimes the incremental produce minor miracles itself. a modern flagship smartphone is not using any technology not known about 50 years ago, but is so refined it's just nuts. I often wonder what a person from the 80s would think presented with like a galaxy 23. they'd be blown away.

I guess theres also the internet to think about. not a technology advancement, but still gigantic impact.

 

[Hodor]

Because the BIG low hanging fruit (electricity, air flight, medical advances such as antibiotics and surgery, radio/tv broadcasts, space travel, nuclear etc) has been discovered. Now it is more as noted, incremental. I dont know that its anybodys fault.

sometimes the incremental produce minor miracles itself. a modern flagship smartphone is not using any technology not known about 50 years ago, but is so refined it's just nuts. I often wonder what a person from the 80s would think presented with like a galaxy 23. they'd be blown away.

I guess theres also the internet to think about. not a technology advancement, but still gigantic impact.

That's exactly what they said in 1850. "All that could be discovered has already been discovered, now we can only slightly improve things". And we know that was an epic fail, because after that enormously lot more has been discovered.

There's a lot of low hanging fruit everywhere, but now it's forbidden to pick it. Scientists can only research in a few pre-approved directions, the rest is taboo. Forbidden. Verboten. Prohibido.

You try going outside of the plotted route and you lose financing. Or you get fired. And your career goes down the drain. There's no lack of research topics, but scientists alone cannot go against global censorship. Unfortunately the worst censorship is in medicine.

 

[Athlonite]

Science 100 years ago hey I found this and this what we can do with it
science today hey I found this but have no idea what we can do with it

 

[mbrowne5061]

Almost all the low-hanging fruit has gone.

For most of our specie's existence, we have barely been scratching on what has been possible. But in the last 100-200 years breakthroughs have been made that have start to discover how things work. But now... while there is much left to discover, the vast majority of it takes vast amounts of resources and skill (often teamwork) to unravel.

Not only that, but some of the "disruptions" were actually pretty disruptive - and not in a good way. Take nuclear technology, for example: I don't think anyone would argue that the creation of the first nuclear reactor was a "disruptive" breakthrough. It lead to the creation of not only nuclear power plants, but the atomic bomb. But poor & rushed application of these technologies lead to a lot of harm as well. There is the obvious: nuclear accidents & atomic weapons fire from testing. There is also the less obvious, but incredibly dumb: radium in freaking everything as a "health supplement", over application of x-rays (especially as novelties - like in shoe fittings), radioactive doctor-prescribed "medicines", etc.

Yeah, we made some great leaps, grabbing at that low hanging fruit. But we also began applying what we learned before having a full understanding of what it is that we just learned. Now, we're more cautious and investigate things in smaller steps - partly out of necessity from the fruit no longer being low hanging, and partly out of learning some bitter lessons.

Now, whether we've become too cautious, that is another matter. Personally, I'd say we've got it about right.

 

[mbrowne5061]

That's exactly what they said in 1850. "All that could be discovered has already been discovered, now we can only slightly improve things". And we know that was an epic fail, because after that enormously lot more has been discovered.

There's a lot of low hanging fruit everywhere, but now it's forbidden to pick it. Scientists can only research in a few pre-approved directions, the rest is taboo. Forbidden. Verboten. Prohibido.

You try going outside of the plotted route and you lose financing. Or you get fired. And your career goes down the drain. There's no lack of research topics, but scientists alone cannot go against global censorship. Unfortunately the worst censorship is in medicine.

Yeah, because who needs ethics anyways. Or forethought. Jump from cellular cultures, right into human trials of that new gene editing technique. What's the worst that could happen?