Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

January 18, a new study published this month in the journal Nature shows that although the number of achievements has been increasing since 1945, it has been more gradual progress. The proportion of disruptive breakthroughs in global scientific research has declined steadily.

The returns people get in the science and technology industry are closely related to the progress of scientific research. The same is true of mobile phones, electric cars and reusable rockets.

In a report published this month in the journal Nature, their research on millions of scientific papers and patents shows that the number of scientific and technological research around the world is growing, but researchers and inventors have made relatively few breakthroughs and innovations. The three researchers found that the proportion of subversive discoveries in all scientific research declined steadily from 1945 to 2010, suggesting that today's scientific work tends to make gradual progress rather than make a knowledge leap in research.

"We should have been in a golden age of new discovery and innovation," said Michael Parker, a doctoral student in entrepreneurship and strategic management at the University of Minnesota and co-author of the paper.

New findings by Parker and his colleagues suggest that scientific investment seems to be caught in a vicious circle of diminishing returns, with the quantity of scientific research in some areas exceeding the quality. The new study does not fundamentally solve the problem, but also raises new questions, such as how much ordinary scientific research can play in opening up new areas of science, unlocking atoms and cosmic mysteries, and what can be done to deal with subversive discoveries. Early studies have also shown that scientific progress is beginning to slow, but it is usually less stringent.

Parker, along with Russell J. Funk of the University of Minnesota and Erin Leahey, a sociologist at the University of Arizona, conducted the research based on an improved citation analysis method. Citation analysis usually tracks how researchers cite each other's published results to distinguish between good ideas and mediocre ideas in a large number of papers. The improved citation analysis method expands the scope of analysis.

"it's a very smart metric," said Pierre Azoulay, a professor of technological innovation, entrepreneurship and strategic management at MIT. "I was dizzy when I saw it. It's like a new toy."

For a long time, researchers have been looking for objective methods to evaluate the status of scientific research. Today, the number of papers published each year has soared to more than 1 million, that is, more than 3000 papers are published every day, which makes it more difficult to evaluate.

Despite the surge in the number of achievements, experts are still debating whether it is a gradual progress in scientific research or "I found it!" This subversive breakthrough can change people's perception of a certain field.

Surprisingly, according to the authors of the new study, discoveries widely hailed as groundbreaking tend to be conventional scientific research, while real leaps are sometimes unknown.

In the example of this study, the No. 1 breakthrough is the progress in gene splicing technology, which is not known to the public science. This gene splicing technique can insert foreign DNA into human and animal cells, not just bacterial cells. This achievement has brought a series of awards to researchers and their institution, Columbia University (Columbia University), as well as nearly $1 billion in license fees, driving the development of the global biotechnology business.

The authors of the new study argue that the two most famous discoveries of this century are triumphs of general scientific research, not subversive leaps. They say the mRNA vaccine stems from decades of hard work by researchers; and the observation of gravitational waves in 2015 was not an unforeseen breakthrough, but a century-old theoretical confirmation, thanks to decades of hard work, testing and sensor equipment development.

"subversion is a good thing," said Wang Dashun, a professor of management and organization at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Business and McCormick School of Engineering, who also used citation analysis in a 2019 study. "you want freshness, but you also need daily science."

When using the improved citation analysis method, the three researchers found a gradual development trend of scientific research in nearly 50 million papers and patents published from 1945 to 2010. They studied four categories: life sciences and biomedical, physical, technological and social sciences, and found a steady decline in so-called "subversive" discoveries. "our findings suggest that the slowdown in the pace of subversion may reflect a shift in the nature of science and technology," they wrote. "

Their new methods and regular citation analysis are based on the fact that scientists need to cite published research that helps form their papers. Since the 1950s, researchers have begun to count these citations to determine the importance of related research.

But statistics can be misleading. Some authors often cite their own research. And the leaders of the scientific community will also get a lot of citations for their otherwise humble discoveries. Worst of all, studies have found that some of the most frequently cited papers have little effect on mainstream technologies that are widely used in the scientific community.

The new method studies citations more deeply, so as to more effectively distinguish daily scientific research work from real subversive breakthroughs. The new study analyzes not only the number of citations of some scientific research, but also the studies cited before the cited scientific research. It turns out that if the results of scientific research were conventional discoveries rather than subversive breakthroughs, previous research would have been cited much more often.

Dr. Fink said the improved method made the new study so computationally expensive that the research team sometimes used supercomputers to process millions of data sets, which "took about a month." "this kind of thing could not have been done ten years ago," he said. "it's within reach now."

The new technology has also helped other researchers such as Wang Dashun. In 2019, he and his colleagues reported that small teams were more innovative than larger ones. The effectiveness of this discovery is very strong, and over the past few decades, the composition of scientific teams has gradually shifted to larger collaborative teams.

University of Chicago sociologist James A. Evans) said in an interview that the new research "puts forward something important." This shows not only the decline in return on investment across the science sector, but also the growing importance of policy reform, he added.

"We have very orderly science," Evans said. "We are confident in the field of investment. but we are not betting on something new that could have a disruptive impact. this paper shows that we need a little less order and a little more chaos."

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