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If you measure by the sheer amount of published papers, we are in the golden age of science. There are more scientists than ever; there are more publications than ever; and while much great work remains underfunded, there is more funding than ever before. Federal R&D funding has grown from $3.5 billion in 1955 to $137.8 billion in 2020, a more than tenfold increase even after adjusting for inflation.

Fields like artificial intelligence and biotechnology seem to be booming, but outside of a few specific areas, like artificial intelligence and biotechnology, it doesn’t seem like we’re in a golden age of science. At the beginning of the 20th century, there were discoveries after discoveries that radically changed our understanding of the world we lived in and revolutionized industry: nitrogen fixation, which made it possible to feed billions; structure of atoms and DNA; rocketry, plate tectonics, radio, computing, antibiotics, general relativity, nuclear chain reactions, quantum mechanics … the list goes on and on.

There might be more science now, but it seems to be nothing compared to the 20th century in terms of discoveries that actually change the world. It seems like we are doing more research and getting less out of it.

That’s the thesis explored in a new Nature article, “Papers and Patents Become Less Disruptive Over Time,” which tries to systematically explore what I said above: more science, but less world-changing science.

The Nature paper looks at patents and papers and tries to measure how much future research has built on a particular publication, or how much a particular paper has served to “push science and technology in new directions.”

Finding: Yes, there seems to be less radical innovation than there used to be.

Are we getting worse at transformative science?

This is not a new question. As the journal Nature notes, previous studies “document declining research productivity in semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, and other fields. See the article : Signed Beam ‘Tops Out’ Future Home of Data Science. Papers, patents, and even grant applications have become less novel than prior work and are less likely to bridge different areas of knowledge, both of which are precursors to innovation. The gap between the year of discovery and the award of the Nobel Prize has also widened, suggesting that today’s contributions cannot be compared to those of the past.”

But these are rather narrow measures of progress, many of them limited to one area or highly subjective (like the judgments of the Nobel Prize committee). The Nature researchers aimed to look at a more comprehensive measure. Thus, they evaluated 25 million papers (1945–2010) and 3.9 million patents (1976–2010) according to a new metric, the so-called “CD index”, which judges whether the papers mainly “consolidate” (or upgrade) knowledge. in the field, or “disrupt” the field and point towards new, fresh avenues of research.

The idea is that if a paper builds on previous work, citations to that work will generally also cite the previous work. If a paper opens up a new line of research, then citations to that paper are less likely to cite previous work. The lower the CD score, the less disruptive the research.

For example, the 1953 paper on the structure of DNA by James Watson and Francis Crick has a very high score as “disruption” on the CD index—it proposed a new view of DNA, and the papers that cited it didn’t bother to cite the old, of the wrong DNA model that he corrected.

The authors of the journal Nature suspected that “disruptive” papers, those that change the field and point to new directions of research, are in decline. And indeed, that’s what they found – and the drop is incredibly dramatic.

In “social sciences”, “average CD5 has fallen from 0.52 in 1945 to 0.04 in 2010.” In “physical sciences”, “average CD5 decreased from 0.36 in 1945 to 0 in 2010.” For “drugs and medical” patents, “average CD5 decreased from 0.38 in 1980 to 0.03 in 2010.” For “computers and communications” patents—one area where we might expect significant progress—”the average CD5 decreased from 0.30 in 1980 to 0.06 in 2010.”

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Why is science getting harder?

One possibility is that we have already found all the most disruptive ideas. At the beginning of the 20th century, there was a lot of basic work that had not yet been done. Of course, the first person ever to study antibiotics would make far more progress than one of 1,000 researchers at a pharmaceutical company 100 years later. Think of it as the “low hanging fruit” theory.

In this regard, scientists now tend to make their important discoveries at an older age and as part of a larger team, perhaps because it takes more time and more effort to learn everything you need to know before you can even get to the head of the field. See the article : Best Science Books: Popular Science Books to Feed Your Imagination.

But this seems a bit circular as an answer. Why don’t scientists discover new things? Perhaps because we have already discovered all the transformative and crucial things. Why do we think we may have discovered all the transformative and crucial things? Well, because scientists don’t find new ones!

It seems entirely possible that the slowdown in science is not an inevitable law of nature, but the result of political choices. The way we award science scholarships is flawed, for example. Despite record levels of funding, we know that visionaries with transformative ideas — like Katalin Karikó, who did key early work on the invention of mRNA vaccines — have struggled to get money for years. And getting money requires jumping through more and more hoops—many leading scientists now spend 50 percent of their time writing grant proposals so they can spend the other 50 percent actually doing science.

“I think because you have to publish to keep your job and to keep the funding agencies happy, there are a lot of (mediocre) science papers out there… with little new science being presented,” wrote Kaitlyn Suski, chemistry and atmospheric science postdoc at Colorado State University, for Vox’s 2016 survey of scientists about what’s wrong with their field.

To say that science is slowing down is inevitable because our predecessors have already grabbed all the good ideas might blind us to the possibility that science is slowing down because we actively mismanage it, directing researchers away from the best use of their time and the most important research and toward the small incremental papers that make funders—and mandate review committees – satisfied.

The decline of science has enormous and far-reaching social implications. Resolution documents often mean new innovations that increase productivity, improve quality of life, raise wages and save lives. Some have speculated that much of the decline in productivity and wages in the US has been caused by a slowdown in scientific innovation.

In reality, of course, the decline in innovative papers is probably the product of many factors, some we can control and some we can’t. But a new Nature paper makes it clear that the effects are huge. And since science is the engine of productivity and prosperity, figuring out why it’s not working as well as it used to couldn’t be more important.

A version of this story was originally published in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to subscribe!

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