I will occasionally post “quick hits” that fit in the bin of general commentary. Although they are not directly linked to African affairs, I like these kinds of posts (and used to have them a lot in my old blog) because they give us a glimpse of what we might be missing in our knowledge production and consequent perception of the state of the world.
The number of science and technology research papers published has skyrocketed over the past few decades — but the ‘disruptiveness’ of those papers has dropped, according to an analysis of how radically papers depart from the previous literature.
Data from millions of manuscripts show that, compared with the mid-twentieth century, research done in the 2000s was much more likely to incrementally push science forward than to veer off in a new direction and render previous work obsolete. Analysis of patents from 1976 to 2010 showed the same trend.
