Research that abounds but stalls

Could it be that scientific research in recent decades is the scene of a disturbing paradox, which until now has remained in the shadows but has recently been revealed through Trauma study Make the cover of the prestigious magazine “Nature”? While the number of scientific articles published each year increases exponentially, this deluge of highly specialized studies will not be accompanied by any acceleration in the rate of occurrence of real “breakthroughs”, those that move the lines and create a break with the given state of knowledge – such as Einstein’s theory of relativity, which completely changed our notions of time and space, or Watson and Crick’s discovery in 1953 (with the help of Rosalind Franklin!) of the double helix structure of DNA.

That’s the conclusion Michael Park and his colleagues at the University of Minnesota, signatories to the Nature study, reached after combing through an enormous corpus of at least 45 million scientific articles (published between 1945 and 2010) and 3.9 million patents (dated). deposited between 1976 and 2010).