Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive

“Ideas are like rabbits,” John Steinbeck said. “You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” Scientific and technological progress is often viewed in this way. Current ideas build on previous ones. And ideas, along with papers and patents, have indeed proliferated in the recent past.Yet despite—or perhaps because of—this productivity (papers published and patents issued each year now number in the millions), it has been documented that innovation within specific fields has been in decline. For example, a paper titled “Science in the age of selfies”, published in 2016, warned of a shifting incentive-and-information landscape in biology, particularly neuroscience, that has diluted the number of high-impact discoveries.