New ideas no longer fuel economic growth the way they once did. A popular explanation for stagnation is that good ideas are harder to find, rendering slowdown inevitable. We present a simple model of the lifecycle of scientific ideas that points to changes in scientist incentives as the cause of scientific stagnation. Over the last five decades, citations have become the dominant way to evaluate scientific contributions and scientists. This emphasis on citations in the measurement of scientific productivity shifted scientist rewards and behavior on the margin toward incremental science and away from exploratory projects that are more likely to fail, but which are the fuel for future breakthroughs. As attention given to new ideas decreased, science stagnated. We also explore ways to broaden how scientific productivity is measured and rewarded, involving both academic search engines such as Google Scholar measuring which contributions explore newer ideas and university administrators and funding agencies utilizing these new metrics in research evaluation. We demonstrate empirically that measures of novelty are correlated with but distinct from measures of scientific impact, which suggests that if also novelty metrics were utilized in scientist evaluation, scientists might pursue more innovative, riskier, projects.
New ideas no longer fuel economic growth the way they once did. A popular explanation for stagnation is that good ideas are harder to find, rendering slowdown inevitable.
Another place to go from there is that ideas aren’t proving as useful as they used to. As if they’re being monopolized somehow. i.e. one could investigate/compare ‘productivity’ and the rules around ‘intellectual property’ such as ‘copyright’.
I think science can be moved forward by a variety of things. Novel hypotheses is one way. Novel observations is another. Novel tools or technology that enable novel observations is another.
We’ve picked a lot of the long hanging fruit in novel tools for many research areas. A multimillion dollar laser microscope is a hard bar to beat in biology. CERN is a hard bar to beat in physics. James Webb telescope recently upstaged Hubble, and the result was a rapid surge in exciting new astronomy papers fueled by the new observations enabled by this new tool.
So I don’t disagree that the lame incentives for predictable incremental grant proposals are part of the problem, but I’m also pretty confident that that isn’t the main source of the slowing of scientific progress.
(Only read the abstract)
Another place to go from there is that ideas aren’t proving as useful as they used to. As if they’re being monopolized somehow. i.e. one could investigate/compare ‘productivity’ and the rules around ‘intellectual property’ such as ‘copyright’.
I think science can be moved forward by a variety of things. Novel hypotheses is one way. Novel observations is another. Novel tools or technology that enable novel observations is another.
We’ve picked a lot of the long hanging fruit in novel tools for many research areas. A multimillion dollar laser microscope is a hard bar to beat in biology. CERN is a hard bar to beat in physics. James Webb telescope recently upstaged Hubble, and the result was a rapid surge in exciting new astronomy papers fueled by the new observations enabled by this new tool.
So I don’t disagree that the lame incentives for predictable incremental grant proposals are part of the problem, but I’m also pretty confident that that isn’t the main source of the slowing of scientific progress.