It's not your imagination: innovation is down.

Clipped from the January 8, 2023 Morning Brew email:

 Innovation peaked with your grandparents. We know we’re supposed to be touting progress in this section, but a study published this week found that science has actually been getting…less innovative since the 1950s. Reviewing data from 45 million papers and 3.9 million patents from six decades across all major fields of science, researchers found that newer discoveries are less likely to be disruptive and push science and technology in a new direction. No one’s exactly sure why, but one theory is that scientists have already found all the “low-hanging fruit.” Another is that they’re working in bigger teams and pushed to publish more frequently, leading to more incremental advancements.

The Brew links this report in the journal Science. I clipped what I could here, most of it is unfortunately behind a paywall.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04577-5

‘Disruptive’ science has declined — and no one knows why

The proportion of publications that send a field in a new direction has plummeted over the past half-century.

 

Max Kozlov  |  January 4, 2023

 

The number of science and technology research papers published has skyrocketed over the past few decades — but the ‘disruptiveness’ of those papers has dropped, according to an analysis of how radically papers depart from the previous literature¹.