I think, this study has more to do with hype, sensationalism and spurious methods then with anything else. I don't have the time to investigate more, but I have some strong hunches. This appears to be more hot air than serious research!
How is disruptive science defined anyway?
Exponential growth in research papers is not necessarily indicative of a growth of high quality science. Maybe it is more publish or perish! More scientists more publications etc.
How about the simple explanation that as of today so many things have been already discovered and invented that it has become more challenging to make new major discoveries. I call it the low hanging fruit hypothesis.
How about the saturation/fatigue hypothesis: There have been so many significant discoveries and innovations lately that disruptive becomes a very relative term.
As we enter the age of AI, machine learning, robotics, autonomous air, land, and water vehicles, drones, genetic editing and so on, we are already witnessing tons of disruptions!
"For example, there are now many more researchers than in the 1940s, which has created a more competitive environment and raised the stakes to publish research and seek patents."
"Other research has suggested that scientific innovation has slowed in recent decades" A dubious claim in my view!
Citation data and its interpretation can be misleading. This is a very strong assumption and to derive a single measure of disruptiveness from citation data is dubious:
"The authors reasoned that if a study was highly disruptive, subsequent research would be less likely to cite the study’s references, and instead would cite the study itself."
The authors also analyzed changes in the language used in research papers. This can be very misleading as well:
"... The authors also analysed the most common verbs used in manuscripts and found that whereas research in the 1950s was more likely to use words evoking creation or discovery such as ‘produce’ or ‘determine’, that done in the 2010s was more likely to refer to incremental progress, using terms such as ‘improve’ or ‘enhance’. ..."
"Data from millions of manuscripts show that, compared with mid-twentieth-century research, that done in the 2000s was much more likely to push science forward incrementally than to veer off in a new direction and render previous work obsolete. Analysis of patents from 1976 to 2010 showed the same trend."
From the abstract:
"Theories of scientific and technological change view discovery and invention as endogenous processes, wherein previous accumulated knowledge enables future progress by allowing researchers to, in Newton’s words, ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’. 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 contrary to this view, studies suggest that progress is slowing in several major fields. Here, we analyse these claims 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—the CD index—that characterizes how papers and patents change networks of citations in science and technology. We find that papers and patents are increasingly less likely to break with the past in ways that push science and technology in new directions. This pattern holds universally across fields and is robust across multiple different citation- and text-based metrics. Subsequently, we link this decline in disruptiveness to a narrowing in the use of previous knowledge, allowing us to reconcile the patterns we observe with the ‘shoulders of giants’ view. We find that the observed declines are unlikely to be driven by changes in the quality of published science, citation practices or field-specific factors. Overall, our results suggest that slowing rates of disruption may reflect a fundamental shift in the nature of science and technology."
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