A leitmotif of this plague chronicle is the profound decadence and dysfunction of modern academia. Following the Science would be inadvisable even if we had some semblance of science. Instead, alas, we have a massive, overbuilt, over-enrolled university apparatus that primarily caters to the careerist concerns of students, researchers and teachers. It is a factory, not of free inquiry, but of conformity. Participants in this charade pantomime disagreement and discovery, but almost nobody ever says anything new or interesting.
For a few days now, I’ve been thinking about this PNAS article published last year on Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science. Its authors marshal data to support their proposition “that when the number of papers published each year” in a given field “grows very large,”
the rapid flow of new papers can force scholarly attention to already well-cited papers …. Rather than causing faster turnover of field paradigms, a deluge of new publications entrenches top-cited papers, precluding new work from rising into the most-cited, commonly known canon of the field.
The more Science you do, in other words, the less stereotypically “scientific” your discourse becomes.
[W]hen many papers are published within a short period of time, scholars are forced to resort to heuristics to make continued sense of the field. … [C]ognitively overloaded reviewers and readers process new work only in relationship to existing exemplars … Faced with this dynamic, authors are pushed to frame their work firmly in relationship to well-known papers, which serve as “intellectual badges” identifying how the new work is to be understood, and discouraged from working on too-novel ideas that cannot be easily related to existing canon. The probabilities of a breakthrough novel idea being produced, published, and widely read all decline, and … the publication of each new paper adds disproportionately to the citations for the already most-cited papers.
The effect is easily quantified:
[W]hen the field of Electrical and Electronic Engineering published ∼10,000 papers a year, the top 0.1% most-cited papers collected 1.5% and the top 1% most-cited collected 8.6% of total citations. When the field grew to 50,000 published papers a year, the top 0.1% captured 3.5% of citations, and the top 1% captured 11.9%. When the field was larger still with 100,000 published papers per year, the top 0.1% received 5.7% of citations within the field and the top 1% received 16.7%. The bottom 50% least-cited papers in contrast decreased in share as the field grew larger, dropping from garnering 43.7% of citations at 10,000 papers to slightly above 20% at both 50,000 and 100,000 papers per year.
Remember that papers are merely conveniently quantifiable proxies for ideas, theories and findings; and that citations are the most straightforward way to measure the attention these ideas, theories and findings receive. At scale, the scientific enterprise rapidly becomes a kind of intramural spectator sport, with the vast majority of “scientists” reduced to passively observing the dialogue unfolding among higher-ups within their own field, while most of their own work – undertaken for careerist purposes – goes unread and unnoticed.
