Phys.org January 4, 2023
Recent decades have witnessed exponential growth in the volume of new scientific and technological knowledge, thereby creating conditions that should be ripe for major advances. Yet studies suggest that progress is slowing in several major fields. A team of researchers in the US (University of Minnesota, University of Arizona) analysed the claims of new scientific and technological knowledge at scale across six decades, using data on 45 million papers and 3.9 million patents from six large-scale datasets, together with a new quantitative metric that characterizes how papers and patents change networks of citations in science and technology. They found that, across all fields, papers and patents are increasingly less likely to break with the past in ways that push science and technology in new directions. They found that the observed declines are unlikely to be driven by changes in the quality of published science, citation practices or field-specific factors. According to the authors their results suggested that slowing rates of disruption may reflect a fundamental shift in the nature of science and technology…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLEÂ
Decline of disruptive science and technology. Credit: Nature volume 613, pages138–144 (2023)Â