Miracle vaccines. Videophones in our pockets. Reusable rockets. Our technological abundance and the associated fading of scientific progress seems undeniable and unsurpassed. Yet analysts now report that the overall pace of true breakthroughs has dropped dramatically over the past nearly three-quarters of a century.
This month, the report’s researchers told Nature how their study of millions of scientific papers and patents shows that researchers and inventors have achieved relatively few breakthroughs and innovations compared to the world’s growing mountain of scientific and technological research. The three analysts found a steady decline from 1945 to 2010 in disruptive finds as part of the booming business, suggesting that scientists today tend to move forward incrementally rather than take intellectual leaps.
“We should be in a golden age of new discoveries and innovations,” said Michael Park, an author of the paper and a doctoral student in entrepreneurship and strategic management at the University of Minnesota.
The new finding by Mr Park and colleagues suggests that investment in science is caught in a spiral of diminishing returns and that quantity trumps quality in some ways. While not addressed in the study, it also raises questions about the extent to which science can open new frontiers and maintain the kind of audacity that has unlocked the atom and the universe, and what can be done to reverse the shift away from breakthrough discovery. Previous studies have pointed to delays in scientific progress, but usually with less accuracy.
Mr. Park, along with Russell J. Funk, also of the University of Minnesota, and Erin Leahey, a sociologist at the University of Arizona, based their study on an improved kind of citation analysis that Dr. Funk helped come up with. In general, citation analysis tracks how researchers cite each other’s published works, as a way to separate bright ideas from unremarkable ideas in a system overrun with papers. Their improved method broadens the analytical scope.
“It’s a really smart metric,” said Pierre Azoulay, a professor of technological innovation, entrepreneurship and strategic management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “I was shocked when I saw it. It’s like a new toy.”
Researchers have long sought objective ways to assess the state of science, which is seen as essential to economic growth, national pride and military strength. It became more difficult to do this as the number of articles published skyrocketed to over a million per year. That’s more than 3,000 newspapers every day — an indecipherable blur by any measure.
Experts are braving the wave and have debated the value of incremental steps versus “Eureka!” moments that change everything that is known about a field.
The new study could deepen the debate. One surprise is that discoveries popularly hailed as groundbreaking are seen by the authors of the new study as often little more than routine science, and real leaps and bounds that are sometimes completely missing from the conversation.
For example, the most significant breakthrough on the study’s list of examples is an advancement in gene splicing little known to popular science. It allowed foreign DNA to be introduced into human and animal cells rather than just bacterial cells. The New York Times referenced it in a 1983 four-paragraph note. Still, the achievement netted a series of awards for the authors and their institution, Columbia University, as well as nearly $1 billion in licensing fees as it launched biotechnology activities around the world.
In contrast, analysts would view two of this century’s most celebrated findings as triumphs of mainstream science rather than sharp leaps. The mRNA vaccines that successfully fight the coronavirus were rooted in decades of unglamorous toil, they noted.
Similarly, the 2015 observation of gravitational waves – subtle ripples in the fabric of space-time – was not an accidental breakthrough, but rather the confirmation of an age-old theory that took decades of hard work, testing and sensor development.
“Disruption is good,” says Dashun Wang, a scientist at Northwestern University who used the new analytical technique in a 2019 study. “You want novelty. But you also want everyday science.”
The three analysts discovered the trend toward incremental progress as they used the enhanced form of citation analysis to scrutinize nearly 50 million papers and patents published between 1945 and 2010. social sciences — and found a steady decline in what they called “confounding” findings. “Our results,” they wrote, “suggest that declining disturbance rates may reflect a fundamental shift in the nature of science and technology.”
Their new method — and citation analysis in general — gains analytical power from the requirement that scientists cite studies that helped shape their published findings. Beginning in the 1950s, analysts began counting those citations as a way to identify important research. It was a kind of scientific applause meter.
But the count can be misleading. Some authors cited their own research quite frequently. And stars of science could get plenty of citations for inconspicuous finds. Worst of all, some of the most cited papers turned out to contain miniscule improvements in popular techniques widely used by the scientific community.
The new method takes a deeper look at citations to better separate day-to-day work from real breakthroughs. It adds up citations not only for the piece of research being analyzed, but also for the previous studies it cites. It turns out that earlier work is much more likely to be cited when the finding is routine rather than groundbreaking. The analytical method turns that difference into a new view of the scientific enterprise.
The measure is called the CD index after its scale, which ranges from consolidating to disrupting the amount of existing knowledge.
Dr. Funk, who helped design the CD index, said the new study was so computationally intensive that the team sometimes used supercomputers to crack the millions of datasets. “It took a month or so,” he said. “This kind of thing was not possible ten years ago. It is only now within reach.”
The new technique has helped other researchers, such as Dr. Cheek. In 2019, he and his colleagues reported that small teams are more innovative than large ones. The finding came at the right time as scientific teams have shifted over the decades to increasingly large groups of collaborators.
In an interview, James A. Evans, a University of Chicago sociologist who, along with Dr. Wang co-authored that article, the new method elegant. “It came with something important,” he said. Its application to science as a whole, he added, suggests not only a decline in returns on investment, but also a growing need for policy reform.
“We have extremely ordered science,” said Dr. Evans. “We bet with confidence on what we invest our money in. But we don’t gamble on fundamentally new things that have the potential to be disruptive. This article suggests that we need a little less order and a little more chaos.”
