Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

To understand the fundamental problem with this paper and the "CD" measure of "disruptiveness", one need only look at Figure 1a, where three Nobel Prize winning papers and three patents are ranked on the "CD5" scale. Apparently, there are more disruptive discoveries than Watson and Crick's discovery of the double-stranded structure of DNA (CD5 0.62 on a scale of -1.0 to 1.0), and Baltimore's discovery of reverse transcription is -0.55. One might argue the ranks of these two discoveries should be reversed, since DNA had already been shown to be the genetic material, but no one imagined that RNA could be converted to DNA. Likewise, the Wigler patent for transformation into eukaryotic cells (CD5=0.70) has certainly has had less effect on the world economy than Monsanto's patent on glyphosphate resistant plants (CD= -0.85).

It's easy to make up a measure and then develop a story that explains why that measure is useful. Was Newton's theory of gravity disruptive, or consolidating. I'm thinking consolidating, since it allowed a lot of other things to make sense. Likewise, perhaps quantum mechanics was disruptive -- it sounds disruptive -- but it also consolidated a lot of confusing observations.

(And lets not even mention the problem that when there are 1,000-times as many papers between 1940 and 2010, we might not expect 1,000-times as many disruptions.)

This paper has a measure that sounds useful, and is certainly good for headlines, but it is very unclear that it provides any insight into the progress of science.

> So instead of being branded a heretic and chased out of town you just starve.

Your income level is probably higher after leaving academia and going to work in industry. So you probably starve more by staying in academia.

That timeline correlates well with the corporatization of academic research timeline, which got started in the late 1970s, boomed in the 1980s and has steadily risen ever since. The emphasis in applied science is now on patents and return-on-investment, aka safe bets. This is certainly the direction that much of NIH fundings, as well as DOE funding, has taken. Part of this is that entrenched industries (natural gas and coal power, say), don't want federal funding going to disruptive competition (monocrystalline silicon PV development, say). This is reflected in how federal funds are distributed as well as what research programs are supported at the university level. For example, count the number of renewable energy departments in the USA academic system: miniscule funding -> no programs.

It can't all be blamed on corporatization, however. The control of funding agencies at the federal level by vested interests seems to be a major problem, i.e. innovative lines of research that threaten the status quo could threaten those cabals that control fund disbursement, so such efforts don't get funded. The stagnation of Alzheimer's research and the focus on the amyloid hypothesis seems to fall into this category. This kind of bureaucratic ossification is not new; the classic example is how Trofim Lysenko in the Soviet Union controlled the direction of agricultural research for about three decades, much to the detriment of the understanding of plant genetics and crop development research in the USSR over that period.

So it can be attributed to the rise of monopolistic corporatization on university campuses on one hand, and the growth of entrenched bureaucracies at the federal funding level on the other. Neither group wants the rug pulled out from under them by 'disruptive innovation'. There are many historical antecedents for this kind of situation, incidentally.

I'm left a bit conflicted by what conclusions to draw from this effort.

How much of this is due to how much easier it is to publish something these days? Every statistics package spits out publication-ready charts and tables, Latex/Word has automated much of the typesetter's art, drafts can be communicated instantly via email, there are instantly searchable and linked databases of papers, etc, etc.

Think about what it was like in the 1950's, when many scientists were hiring typists to convert their longhand manuscripts into something an editor could read, attaching hand drawn figures, then heading down to the post office to mail the draft in. That draft then had to be copied and mailed to reviewers, who then mailed their opinions back, every step taking at least a few days of communication overhead. It was a different world and it gradually changed with widespread adoption of different technologies.

Also how does this interact with another pair of common suggestions for improving science: publishing negative results and doing more replications? Is this a sign that those two good practices are already occurring? Is it possible that the higher rate of disruption was due to shoddier work in the past?

Studying the genetic basis for various characteristics is not eugenics, anymore than studying the atom is building a nuclear weapon. Abuse of knowledge should be controlled, but banning the pursuit of knowledge itself?

That's just intentionally crippling our own understanding of the world, for fear that we might not like what we discover. That's hardly an unprecedented behavior, to say the least, but the cultures that have gone that direction are probably not the sort we might want to emulate.