Concerning the recently published study spanning six decades in Nature (link above), I am curious about the authors' omission of size control for research teams. It raises the question of whether the global decline in small research teams, acknowledged as catalysts for disruption (Wu et al., 2019), may be influencing the study's outcomes.
Additionally, the decision to examine patents as a metric is noteworthy. Given the prevailing perception that many patents represent intellectual redundancy, as highlighted in a piece from The Economist. Not to mention that Blind et al. (2021) were the first to study long-term effects showing that standards, not patents, can be used as a proxy for the diffusion of innovative knowledge.
Last but not least, since academic inbreeding is detrimental to risk-taking in research (Horta et al. 2020), and since the physicist, Carlo Rovelli said not long ago that only rebel scientists can be truly creative, and since disruptions in science require disconnection and discord (Lin et. al., 2022) i wonder if the aforementioned findings mean that the science community is failing to generate enough rebel scientists.
It would be most ironic if science were unable to generate rebel scientists at the precise moment that scientists are being asked to join civil disobedience movements. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-019-0979-y
PS - I wonder if the results of the aforementioned study would remain unchanged if the authors had utilized the new metric proposed in the recent paper entitled "Quantifying revolutionary discoveries: Evidence from Nobel prize-winning papers," which was published 5 days ago and claims to be "the first metric to quantify revolutionary discoveries".
