Is disruption decreasing, or is it accelerating?

TL;DR

This paper challenges previous claims that scientific disruption is decreasing by applying a weighted disruption index that accounts for publication growth, revealing that disruption has remained stable or increased in recent decades.

Contribution

It introduces a weighted disruption index that adjusts for publication growth, providing a more accurate measure of scientific disruption over time.

Findings

Weighted disruption index has been near neutral over 50 years.

Disruption has modestly increased since 2000.

Previous measures underestimated disruption due to publication growth.

Abstract

A recent highly-publicized study by Park et al. (Nature 613: 138-144, 2023), claiming that science has become less disruptive over recent decades, represents an extraordinary achievement but with deceptive results. The measure of disruption, CD-5, in this study does not account for differences in citation amid decades of exponential growth in publication rate. In order to account for both the exponential growth as well as the differential impact of research works over time, here we apply a weighted disruption index to the same dataset. We find that, among research papers in the dataset, this weighted disruption index has been close to its expected neutral value over the last fifty years and has even increased modestly since 2000. We also show how the proportional decrease in unique words (highlighted by Park et al. (2023) is expected in an exponentially growing corpus. Finding little evidence for recent decrease in disruption, we suggest that it is actually increasing.