‘Slowing Rates of Disruption,’ Decline in Scientific Breakthroughs, Researchers Stumped

A researcher examines plated samples in a lab that is developing testing for the COVID-19 coronavirus at Hackensack Meridian Health Center for Discovery and Innovation on Feb. 28, 2020 in Nutley, Kena Betancur/Getty Images

The rate of scientific breakthroughs has been falling over the years, especially in the fields of physics and chemistry according to a recent study, with researchers unsure what is causing the phenomenon.

In recent decades, there has been an “exponential growth” in the volume of new technological and scientific knowledge, which created conditions necessary for major advances in those fields, states the study, published in Nature magazine on Jan. 4. But contrary to such expectations, the study found that progress is slowing down in several fields.

“You don’t have quite the same intensity of breakthrough discoveries you once had,” said Russell Funk, co-author of the study.

The research team looked at 45 million papers and 3.9 million patents. They used a new quantitative metric called the “CD index” to identify how papers and patents “change networks of citations in science and technology.”

The team found that papers and patents are increasingly less likely to push science and technology into newer directions, a trend that is breaking away from the past.

“We link this decline in disruptiveness to a narrowing in the use of previous knowledge, allowing us to reconcile the patterns we observe with the ‘shoulders of giants’ view,” the study said.

“We find that the observed declines are unlikely to be driven by changes in the quality of published science, citation practices, or field-specific factors. Overall, our results suggest that slowing rates of disruption may reflect a fundamental shift in the nature of science and technology.”

Burden of Research

The study is the first one to “emphatically, convincingly” document that there is a decline of disruptiveness in science and technology spanning all major fields, lead author Michael Park said in an interview with AFP.

The largest decline in disruptiveness was observed in physical sciences like chemistry and physics. A popular theory that seeks to explain the falling growth in scientific breakthroughs is that the “low-hanging fruit” of science has already been plucked.

However, Park disputes that idea by pointing out that the decline in disruptiveness would have fallen at an even faster pace should this have been the case. Instead, the team found that the declines are “pretty consistent” in their speeds and timing across all major fields.

As such, the team is proposing that the “burden of research” is the reason behind the decline in disruptiveness, meaning that there is now so much knowledge that scientists need to master that they have little time to push for breakthroughs.

This makes scientists “focus on a narrow slice of the existing knowledge, leading them to just come up with something more consolidating rather than disruptive,” Park said.

Another reason might be that “there’s increasing pressure in academia to publish, publish, publish, because that’s the metric that academics are assessed on.”

Boosting Disruptiveness

To promote disruptiveness in science and technology, the study proposes encouraging scholars to read widely and that they be given enough time to keep up with the rapidly growing body of knowledge.

Instead of focusing on quantity, universities might be better off focusing on and rewarding research quality as well as fully subsidizing “year-long sabbaticals to allow academics to read and think more deeply.”

When it comes to federal agencies, they should seek to invest in “riskier and longer-term individual awards” that would give scholars the time needed to produce consequential work rather than waste it on the “publish or perish culture,” the study suggested.

“Understanding the decline in disruptive science and technology more fully permits a much-needed rethinking of strategies for organizing the production of science and technology in the future,” it said.

A slowdown in innovation was an idea explored in a 2009 study which theorized that if knowledge accumulates as technology advances, then successive generations of innovators can face a greater burden of education.

Social Justice Versus Science

At present, the pursuit of science is also under attack from “social justice” ideologies like critical race theory (CRT), queer theory, and so on. While CRT insists that white men are oppressive toward people from other races, queer theory rejects the idea that we can collect objective verifiable information about reality, and refers to the biological division of human sexuality into male and female as oppressive.

These ideologies can lead to compromise in true scientific pursuit in certain instances. For instance, diversity, inclusion, and equity (DIE), which are based on CRT and Queer Theory, can end up excluding talented people from science.

Writing for the National Post, Patanjali Kambhampati, an immigrant to the United States, reveals that he was denied science funding in North America twice by Canada’s federal science foundations because he insisted on hiring research assistants on merit rather than their gender, ethnicity, or cultural background.

“Over the past year, the encroachment of the cult of DIE into academia has only grown. There are now many positions that are simply off-limits to straight white men who are not handicapped. One must pledge allegiance to these illiberal principles in order to be a practicing scientist in 2022,” Kambhampati said.