Maybe scientific progress isn’t slowing, after all

A widely cited 2023 Nature paper found that scientific papers and patents had become dramatically less disruptive since the 1950s, based on 45m papers and 3.9m patents. A new critique argues that most of the fall vanishes after correcting database errors—many older papers with references were wrongly recorded as reference-free and therefore maximally disruptive—and adjusting for citation inflation may even show rising disruption after 2005. Other evidence still suggests research productivity is getting harder to buy, so the broad stagnation thesis remains unresolved rather than disproved.