Regarding the puzzling decline of disruptive science

An analysis of 25 million scientific papers published between 1945 and 2010 and 3.9 million patents from 1976 to 2010 found the proportion of “disruptive” papers and patent being published fell. This research was published in the top-tier science journal Nature. 

My instantaneous thought was that all the easy stuff has been discovered and now the pace of major advances will slow. I was wrong. The authors examined that possibility and rejected it as being the major cause. It might be part of the cause, but it’s not the whole cause. Something odd is going on but the reason(s) remain mostly unknown. It’s probably a multi-factored phenomenon.

What this means that science has become more incremental than disruptive than in the past. But that is not necessarily a bad thing. We just do not yet know what it means.




The full research article is here. Figure 3 is shown below.




By Germaine: The science guy

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