Dropping Disruption

A NEW HISTORICAL ANALYSIS REVEALS THAT PUBLISHED SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH HAS BEEN GETTING LESS AND LESS DISRUPTIVE OVER TIME.

FOR YEARS, scientists and other intellectuals have been lamenting that major innovations seem increasingly hard to come by. But until 2023, the extent to which this trend has infiltrated all of science and technology was unknown.

Across 45 million papers and 3.9 million patents, a team of researchers found that, from 1945 to 2010, the likelihood of any given paper being disruptive has declined across all fields of science and technology, even as the amount of scientific work published has increased.

Publishing in Nature in January 2023, the researchers quantified scientific disruption using a metric that Russell Funk, sociologist at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, developed in 2017. Using the vast web of citations that connect every publication in the scientific literature, Funk’s team scored every paper and patent on a scale from “consolidating” to “disruptive,” based on whether a paper usurps its predecessors in future citations or simply joins them.

Though some are calling the innovation slowdown a “wake-up call,” the trend may be an emergent property of modern science. When so many papers are published, it’s hard to break ahead of the pack.

SCIENTISTS AND inventors, the researchers found, are also citing older work and less diverse work, and are more likely to cite their own work. The authors suspect this is a result of the deluge of new work published each day.

“There’s an overabundance of new ideas that people have to keep up with, so people are responding by just focusing on a narrow stream of research,” says lead author Mike Park, now assistant professor at the organizational behavior department at INSEAD, an international business school headquartered in France. “When scientists and inventors rely on less diverse work, they tend to produce less disruptive things.”

A number of additional factors likely drive the decline, like pressure to publish more papers, and the increased difficulty for disruptive ideas to get funding and for such papers to pass peer review. There’s also inertia in running a research program, both in terms of specialized knowledge as well as supplies and lab equipment.

“I think people are stretched really thin,” says Funk, underscoring how innovation often requires personal time and space to reflect or dig deeply into a problem. “That’s getting harder and harder to do these days.” Still, it may be that all this isn’t worse for the pace of overall scientific breakthroughs, just different. Perhaps as humanity’s understanding of reality expands, all fields become more granular.

Incremental discoveries are also helpful and needed, notes Park. “Yes, disruption is good, but sometimes fields just mature,” he adds.