The proportion of publications that send a field in a new direction has plummeted over the last half-century. Data from millions of manuscripts show that, compared with the mid-twentieth century, research done in the 2000s was much more likely to incrementally push science forward than to veer off in a new direction and render previous work obsolete. Analysis of patents from 1976 to 2010 showed the same trend.

“The data suggest something is changing,” says Russell Funk, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis

  • @Tiuku@sopuli.xyz
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    21 year ago

    Isn’t this to be expected sooner or later anyway? There are only so many useful discoveries to be made, though I’m not saying that the present decline is because of this limit.