I am really not convinced at all by the "Papers and patents are becoming less #disruptive over time" paper. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05543-x
The metric used (CD index and CD5) is highly problematic.
If I am not mistaken, 2 examples with Figure 5 (Nobel Prize-winning papers): the #discovery of reverse transcriptase (paper in 1970 baltimore, 1975 Nobel) & mobile element (Paper in 1950 McClintock Nobel 1983) are measured as ......non-disruptive
Really looks like an analysis of citation behavior to me (with a problematic metric) rather than an analysis of "disruptivity"
@AVerger One of the key things thats fishy to me is that, in all these different fields, it seems that CD5 isn't just decreasing but asymptotically approaching 0. As far as I understand the metric, I don't think we should be expecting all fields to be converging to the same level, precisely halfway between "disruptive" and "consolidating"--whatever that means.
More likely they all are going to 0 because of the denominator of the metric used to normalize it between -1 to +1 scales with the number of papers. As the number of papers goes up, youd expect all metrics to approach zero as the denominator gets quite large. They try to address this, but I think none of their controls is particularly convincing as presented.
@askennard @AVerger
anyone who has any familiarity with the fields of, say, optical metamaterials or cancer treatment would laugh at the idea that science is getting less innovativee
ditto cognitive science
and that is just the stuff that I know about off the top of my head