THE IMPERATIVE TO PUBLISH CROWDS OUT CREATIVITY.

My Twitter feed a few weeks back included a reference to the latest lamentations.  "Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time."  In the Twitter thread is one possible explanation:  "It is the funding system."  Pajamas Media's Stephen Kruiser offers another:  "Echo chambers are THE WORST when it comes to creativity and new ideas."  The Nature article doesn't directly endorse either, although it hints at both.

Subsequently, we link this decline in disruptiveness to a narrowing in the use of previous knowledge, allowing us to reconcile the patterns we observe with the ‘shoulders of giants’ view. We find that the observed declines are unlikely to be driven by changes in the quality of published science, citation practices or field-specific factors. Overall, our results suggest that slowing rates of disruption may reflect a fundamental shift in the nature of science and technology.

The full text of the article is still available online, and, after a great deal of statistical inference, the discussion commences with some instructive passages.

Our analyses show that this trend is unlikely to be driven by changes in citation practices or the quality of published work. Rather, the decline represents a substantive shift in science and technology, one that reinforces concerns about slowing innovative activity. We attribute this trend in part to scientists’ and inventors’ reliance on a narrower set of existing knowledge. Even though philosophers of science may be correct that the growth of knowledge is an endogenous process—wherein accumulated understanding promotes future discovery and invention—engagement with a broad range of extant knowledge is necessary for that process to play out, a requirement that appears more difficult with time. Relying on narrower slices of knowledge benefits individual careers⁵³, but not scientific progress more generally.

Moreover, even though the prevalence of disruptive works has declined, we find that the sheer number has remained stable. On the one hand, this result may suggest that there is a fixed ‘carrying capacity’ for highly disruptive science and technology, in which case, policy interventions aimed at increasing such work may prove challenging. On the other hand, our observation of considerable churn in the underlying fields responsible for producing disruptive science and technology suggests the potential importance of factors such as the shifting interests of funders and scientists and the ‘ripeness’ of scientific and technological knowledge for breakthroughs, in which case the production of disruptive work may be responsive to policy levers.

To do so, though, would be to disrupt the evolved pattern of scholarly publication.

Universities may forgo the focus on quantity, and more strongly reward research quality⁵⁶, and perhaps more fully subsidize year-long sabbaticals. Federal agencies may invest in the riskier and longer-term individual awards that support careers and not simply specific projects⁵⁷, giving scholars the gift of time needed to step outside the fray, inoculate themselves from the publish or perish culture, and produce truly consequential work. Understanding the decline in disruptive science and technology more fully permits a much-needed rethinking of strategies for organizing the production of science and technology in the future.

I doubt, given the radical egalitarian nature of university faculties marinated in a culture of professional jealousy (even though those two things are in tension) that the people who play the Glass Bead Game well and rack up dozens of publications in the likes of Rivista Internazionale Numere Due di Bovini are going to look favorably on their colleagues who take a few more months, or a year or two, to produce the kind of paper that cites a lot of previous research in order to become the "disruptive" paper that every new publication thereafter cites.  If you want to be more polemical, read Steven Hayward, away from his Power Line haunts.

So suppose you are a young—and untenured—faculty in a science department at a university or government agency. What is the best career path forward? It lies in producing small, incremental work that builds within the boundaries of the existing “consensus.” Boldness and unconventional thinking is not only unlikely to be rewarded, but will likely be a hindrance to your career advancement.

  Inside Higher Ed's Steven Mintz continues in a similar vein.

I do worry that certain kinds of breakthrough research may be stagnating. In my own field, the number of pathbreaking, paradigm-shattering U.S. history books appears to have declined precipitously and fewer new fields of study seem to be opening up. It was a journalist, Nikole Hannah-Jones, not an academic historian, who provoked the biggest debate in my field in recent years. When I think of the books that busted conventional thinking about the history of race in the United States, many that come to mind are by nonacademics, like Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste.

Somewhat similarly, would anyone argue that literary studies has produced as many trailblazing works as the 1970s or that the field is as dynamic and disruptive as it was then?

Great scholarship continues to appear, but conceptual, methodological, analytical and theoretical breakthroughs seem to have faded—even though exciting opportunities for quantum leaps, for example, in comparative studies, abound.

One might attribute this quiescence in the humanities to an aging professoriate or to shrinking doctoral programs and departments and increasing reliance on adjuncts. Maybe we have a publicity problem, as avant-garde and cutting-edge scholarship fails to get the exposure it deserves. Or, more likely, the humanities fields have gravitated toward what Thomas Kuhn termed “normal science”: scholarship that takes place within a settled paradigm.

I fear that scholarly torpor and a repetition compulsion beset the fields I am most familiar with. After all, the key interpretative and explanatory frameworks, including deconstruction, the new historicism, the new social and cultural history and even critical race theory, are now 60 years old. Much of what strikes journalists as novel and trendsetting is in fact old hat to anyone who has followed the field closely since the early 1970s.

Well, yes, if you are able to apply first a Marxian reading and then a Lacanian reading to the same Shakespeare play, you get two minimal publishable units out of it.  Those are the coin of the realm, and deans who cannot grasp deep arguments in fields far from their own can count: and Charlie "Prof Scam" Sykes included in his now thirty year old manifesto a memo from a department head who advised his faculty that new research didn't have to be pathbreaking; entries in "archival" journals would be fine.  Nothing has changed since, notes Professor Mintz.

Two decades ago, Jerome McGann, a University of Virginia authority on literary and cultural history, published an essay in Critical Inquiry that spoke of a malaise in humanities scholarship that had persisted for more than a decade, driven, in part, by the pressure on junior scholars to publish quickly, frequently and within recognizable formats. If that was true in 2004, it’s even more true today, as the competition for jobs has intensified exponentially.

Apparently, there are minimal publishable units to be had responding to work that is wrong (I'm looking right at the 1619 Project, although there are also economists who get cited a lot for being wrong).  And public support?  Its presence crowds out disruption.  My experiences at four research universities and as a National Institutes of Health (NIH) research fellow taught me that the relentless pursuit of taxpayer funding has eliminated curiosity, basic competence, and scientific integrity in many fields."  Minding the Campus contributor J. Scott Turner appears to concur.

Stephen Turner and Daryl Chubin have reflected on this problem in an interesting way. They argue that the massive increase in science expenditures since the 1950s has brought about a radical change in what they call the ethic of science. Whereas scientists prior to World War II built their careers around an “ethic of discovery,” the voluminous post-war revenue stream has transformed science into an “ethic of production.” In an ethic of discovery, scientists strive to be disruptive. Success lies in pushing back the “endless frontier.” Judgment of peers is crucial in determining whether, and how, the frontier had been pushed back. Rewards follow from doing disruptive work. In an ethic of production, however, scientists are judged by how scientifically “productive” they are, as measured by papers published and cited, students trained, and (most importantly) grants won.

Turner and Chubin argue that the numerous pathologies that afflict modern science follow from this shift in ethical norms, a shift, they point out, that has been driven by increased spending on science. These pathologies include: conformity; crowd-following; suppression of dissent; and denigration of the original or creative thinker. That is a recipe for producing “consolidating,” that is to say, unimaginative, research. Disruptive research is not welcome under an ethic of production.

It's a perverse ethic of production as well, more like the custom in a union shop of not being a rate-buster, as well as an echo chamber..  His verdict?

The inescapable conclusion is that we are spending tens of billions of dollars on essentially pointless scientific activity: exponential increases in papers that are never read, more and more scientists who seek affirmation rather than adventure, and institutions that value money and power more than fostering scientific discovery. In other words, our $85 billion (and growing) expenditure is fostering a generation of intellectual squishes and rent-seekers. This leads, in turn, to the really uncomfortable conclusion that the Nature authors seemed unwilling to explore, and that conservative commentators seem unable to draw: we are spending too much money on science.

The solution? Science will recover when an ethic of discovery can be restored. That will mean, among other things, shuttering the National Science Foundation, closing down all the extramural research programs presently managed by numerous federal agencies, and getting the federal government out of academic research altogether.

These are sacred cows that all the institutions of modern science will defend tooth and nail. Yet, by the terms of the 1950s idealistic vision that justified the federal intrusion into the academic sciences, the experiment has been a colossal failure. The course of action is clear: Shut down the experiment, choke off the ethic of production, thin the herd at the endless frontier, and disruption just might come back to the sciences—and the value of science to society along with it.

Perhaps somewhere Charlie Sykes is fretting about being slagged on for such things three decades back.