Related papers: Pushing the complexity barrier: diminishing return…
The contradiction between physical and economical sciences concerning the growth of the production/consumption mechanism is analyzed. It is then shown that if one wishes to keep the security level stable or to enhance it in a growing…
Despite the extraordinary successes the two great bastions of $20^{th}$ century science (Quantum Theory and General Relativity) are troubled with serious conceptual and mathematical difficulties. As a result, further growth of fundamental…
Scientific and technological progress is largely driven by firms in many domains, including artificial intelligence and vaccine development. However, we do not know yet whether the success of firms' research activities exhibits dynamic…
The emergence of "big data" offers unprecedented opportunities for not only accelerating scientific advances but also enabling new modes of discovery. Scientific progress in many disciplines is increasingly enabled by our ability to examine…
For a variety of inter-related cultural, organizational, and political reasons, progress in climate science and the actual solution of scientific problems in this field have moved at a much slower rate than would normally be possible. Not…
Scientific publications enable results and ideas to be transmitted throughout the scientific community. The number and type of journal publications also have become the primary criteria used in evaluating career advancement. Our analysis…
It has long been known that scientific output proceeds on an exponential increase, or more properly, a logistic growth curve. The interplay between effort and discovery is clear, and the nature of the functional form has been thought to be…
We discuss whether science is in the process of being transformed from a quest for causality to a quest for correlation in light of the recent development in artificial intelligence. We observe that while a blind trust in the most seductive…
Teams dominate the production of high-impact science and technology. Analyzing teamwork from more than 50 million papers, patents, and software products, 1954-2014, we demonstrate across this period that larger teams developed recent,…
The design of research grants has been hypothesized to be a useful tool for influencing researchers and their science. We test this by conducting two thought experiments in a nationally representative survey of academic researchers. First,…
After 2009 many governments implemented austerity measures, often restricting science funding. Did such restrictions further skew grant income towards elite scientists and universities? And did increased competition for funding undermine…
The development of inventions is theorized as a process of searching and recombining existing knowledge components. Previous studies under this theory have examined myriad characteristics of recombined knowledge and their performance…
Institutions and their aggregates are not the right units of analysis for developing a science policy with cognitive goals in view. Institutions, however, can be compared in terms of their performance with reference to their previous…
The past few centuries have witnessed a dramatic growth in scientific and technological knowledge. However, the nature of that growth - whether exponential or otherwise - remains controversial, perhaps partly due to the lack of quantitative…
This special volume of Statistical Sciences presents some innovative, if not provocative, ideas in the area of reliability, or perhaps more appropriately named, integrated system assessment. In this age of exponential growth in science,…
Scientific output varies between research fields and between disciplines within a field such as astrophysics. Even in fields where publication is the primary output, there is considerable variation in publication and hence in citation…
Research projects are primarily collaborative in nature through internal and external partnerships, but what role does funding play in their formation? Here, we examined over 43,000 funded projects in the past three decades, enabling us to…
A recent highly-publicized study by Park et al. (Nature 613: 138-144, 2023), claiming that science has become less disruptive over recent decades, represents an extraordinary achievement but with deceptive results. The measure of…
For decades the number of scientific publications has been rapidly increasing, effectively out-dating knowledge at a tremendous rate. Only few scientific milestones remain relevant and continuously attract citations. Here we quantify how…
The past decade has seen incredible scaling of AI systems by a few companies, leading to inequality in AI model performance. This paper argues that, contrary to prevailing intuition, the diminishing returns to compute scaling will lead to a…