Scientific innovation is stagnating. Despite the exponential increase in scientific knowledge in the 20th century Compared to the rest of recorded history, an analysis of millions of academic publications and technological patents from the last 60 years infers a gradual decline in disruption. The perverse incentives generated by the research field may have been to blame: the need to constantly publish to be relevant in the academic world or the vast dimension of knowledge, which makes it practically impossible to follow what is happening beyond the niche of study of a scientific. It is the conclusion of a literature review published today by the scientific journal Nature, after reviewing 45 million scientific articles and close to four million patents.
Disruptive innovation in science is what breaks with the way of thinking up to that moment, knowledge or technology that opens up new areas of research.
Russell Funk, University of Minnesota
the researchers russell funk Y Michael Parkfrom the University of Minnesota, point out in this study a pronounced decrease in disruptive innovation that changes the status quo of the moment, in academic areas such as engineering and physics, but also in the registration of patents for new technologies or drugs. Funk and Park’s review develops its own index where it ranks millions of scientific investigations and patents registered between 1945 and 2010, and categorizes them in a scale between what is disruptive —such as the discovery of the DNA double helix by Francis Crick , James Watson, and Rosalind Franklin—or that establishes and extends prior scientific knowledge. Disruptive innovation in science is “something that breaks with the way of thinking or doing things until then and results in scientific knowledge or technology that opens up new areas of research”, as defined by Funk, the principal investigator of this study.
Among the figures for the evaluation of the works, a decrease of more than 90% in innovation in social or physical sciences stands out, and 80% in the registration of technology, such as microprocessors or telecommunications, or 91.5% in the case of drugs in medicine. In addition to the citations of other works, the researchers evaluate the language used in studies for more than half a century and correlate it with the research that has been awarded with the Nobel, which is about 635 laureates.
Funk recognizes the limitations of his model and understands that all these analyzes are “approximate ways of approaching knowledge” and they are carried out to go beyond simple references in the works. “In the end you don’t know why something is cited. We assume that references to previous scientific papers represent building blocks of knowledge, but they can mean anything, such as authors citing what they believe will be their supervisors or favorable mentions to editors”, reflects the author.
The researchers from the University of Minnesota consider that the results of their review do not imply that “we are facing the end of knowledge”, they clarify in their conclusions, but that the stagnation in innovation may be a consequence of the current scientific production model. For Funk, this is due to the fact that “one way in which institutions evaluate the academic quality of researchers is, to a large extent, based on their productivity in the publication of articles, and that is why scientists are very focused on producing things, because it is a metric of success.” In the conclusions of their research, the authors criticize that this model may be good for the researcher, but bad for knowledge as a whole.
publish or perish
What is known colloquially as “publish or perish” is one of the problems derived from the academic system. A model that fosters detrimental dynamics because it forces researchers to constantly publish studies in order to maintain their academic relevance, qualify for funding, or even maintain their work. Funk points to this problem as one of the culprits of research continuity, since it does not allow experimenting or entering other fields of knowledge.
An example of this situation occurs in works that reference very old studies, which means that the author has not been updated, or when academics self-cite excessively. The main author points out that “it is a common practice for a researcher to cite his own work, since he does not want to break with his line of research, but that prevents disruption.”
We know that innovation comes from trying new things and taking ideas from different fields. If you only have time to publish, that doesn’t allow you to think or read from other areas.
Michael Park, University of Minnesota
The depth of knowledge, the huge number of hours of specialization required to master a scientific field, also becomes a problem. In the study, they point out that scientists rely on less and less variety of sources and this indicates that their window of knowledge has been reduced, so that the complexity of science ends up generating silos isolated from each other. “We know that innovation comes from trying new things and taking ideas from different fields,” Park details. “If you only have time to publish, that doesn’t leave you time to think or read in other areas,” she adds. For the co-investigator of the study, a model that encourages innovation should encourage the citing of works from other different fields: “Previous statistical studies show that disruption is related to broad knowledge, a varied mix of studies.”
Far from trying to sound pessimistic or alarmist, the researchers state that the disruption “remains constant” over the decades, so it is not the fault of the quality of the studies. “It’s not that everything is bad, but there should be a better balance between innovation and established knowledge,” says Funk, who encourages that it is necessary to rethink scientific-technological production strategies in the future. “In the end, we are interested in ideas and scientific knowledge, we shouldn’t worry about citations,” says the author.
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