Disruptive science has declined (might have bigger implications for social sciences)
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.
I: Science isn’t what it used to be
This is from Nature:
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.
“The data suggest something is changing,” says Russell Funk, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and a co-author of the analysis, which was published on 4 January in Nature. “You don’t have quite the same intensity of breakthrough discoveries you once had.”
What explains the decline in disruptiveness?
The trend might stem in part from changes in the scientific enterprise. For example, there are now many more researchers than in the 1940s, which has created a more competitive environment and raised the stakes to publish research and seek patents. That, in turn, has changed the incentives for how researchers go about their work. Large research teams, for example, have become more common, and Wang and his colleagues have found that big teams are more likely to produce incremental than disruptive science.
II: What does this mean for the social sciences?
When I read this paper my immediate thought was the huge implications this has for the social sciences — especially political science and economics. In both disciplines the size (and cost) of research teams has increased substantially over the last 30 years. The credibility revolution has also (very rightfully so) constrained the scope of causal claims (although there are concerns that it might have created “intellectual straitjacket”).
By design, research processes are now a lot more narrow and controlled — which makes them less processes of discovery and more validation of the existing scope of human knowledge (and imagination).
Another feature of the social sciences that may reduce the likelihood of discontinuous discoveries is the fact that sub-disciplines tend to exhibit significant geographic concentration in their sources of evidence. For example, India and Kenya are disproportionately represented in development economics research. Kenya has less than 4% of Africa’s population but accounts for about 25% of research published in the top 5 economics journals.
If context matters at all in the social sciences (ha!), then we are severely limited in what we learn about the state of the world.
Recall that a common approach in the era of tighter research design is to calibrate expectations based on existing research. If that research isn’t sufficiently distributed to capture real world variation, chances of missing important discoveries go up.
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III: How can Africanist social scientists optimize for “real” discoveries?
It would seem that to ensure that we are truly adding to the stock of knowledge about the region a few things need to be done.
Avoid the methodological wars. I used to think that there being an imagined finite supply of Africanists, they should optimize their research approaches (questions, methods, cases) to address the region’s socio-economic challenges. I no longer hold that “scarcity” view. Instead of prescribing any particular “optimization formula,” what we need is ever more research of all stripes (with caveats about doing good work regardless of the approach, etc).
Everyone should read and cite more researchers based in African universities. To avoid the problem of feigning ignorance in research or ignoring the works of researchers at African universities, everyone should read more. And by that I mean read more, and not a quick twitter bleg on what to read on the plane on your way to do “fieldwork” for five days. I for one wish we could replicate the “good old days” (pre 1980s) when genuine collaborative research took place at African universities.
Everyone should write more books. These days a lot of people believe that books should be papers… I would argue that part of the problem is because we are producing too many books that are little more than 2-3 empirical papers and filler chapters. We need more books that allow researchers to seriously think about a topic in writing. Books allow for all sorts of risk taking that aren’t feasible in journal papers. Plus there are hardly enough books on African societies!
Everyone should try and study the same question in the same place for a decade or so. As the social sciences get more tech’d up, researchers have become a lot more mobile across cases. This is fine (I am a Comparativist!) However, it would be nice if researchers also retained a “home base” that they studied over a long period of time. Doing so would allow for a bit less ex-ante control of study design, possible unanticipated discoveries, and hopefully within-researcher intellectual evolution.
All that said, we should also accept that the best that some lines of research can offer is incremental improvements of our knowledge of the state of the world.