The Atlantic
We Need a New Science of Progress
Humanity needs to get better at knowing how to get better.
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Reader View · · The size of scientific fields may impede the rise of new ideas. Examining 1.8 billion citations among 90 million papers across 241 subjects, we find a deluge of papers does not lead to turnover of central ideas in a field, but rather to ossification of canon. Scholars in fields where many papers are published annually face difficulty getting published, read, and cited unless their work references already widely cited articles. New papers containing potentially important contributions cannot garner field-wide attention through gradual processes of diffusion. These findings suggest fundamental progress may be stymied if quantitative growth of scientific endeavors—in number of scientists, institutes, and papers—is not balanced by structures fostering disruptive scholarship and focusing attention on novel ideas.
Web of Science data are available from Clarivate Analytics (<https://clarivate.libguides.com/rawdata>). Disruption score data ([4][1]) are from Lingfei Wu, with replication data at <https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/JPWNNK>. Aggregate data used to produce figures are available at <https://github.com/advrk/PNAS2021>.
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Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe: ‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’
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