Has Corporatization Sucked the Joy from Science?

I’ve seen a recent opinion on social media amongst medical trainees that research is boring, something done only to check the boxes to advance in one’s career. I don’t know the penetrance of this opinion and it may be isolated, but I see a link between this dispassionate description of research activities by trainees and a recent paper discussing the decline of disruptive science. Hear me out.

In 2016, Funk and Owen-Smith published something called the consolidation-disruption index (CDI) [1]. Essentially, this index expresses whether a new study consolidates scientific understanding, that is whether it reinforces current understanding of a subject, versus disruption, which is whether it brings new ideas and updates to understanding of a subject. The CDI is calculated based on the number of citations a study has in the 5 years following its publication and expressed on a scale from -1 (most consolidating) to 1 (most disruptive).

Earlier this year, Park et al. applied this formula to 45 million scientific papers and 3.9 million patents published across a 60-year span in 4 disciplines – life sciences, physical sciences, social sciences, and technology [2]. They found an astounding and alarmingly steady decline in the average CDI across all disciplines studied from 1950 to 2010. Life sciences experienced the greatest decline in disruptive papers, while technology experienced the least.

Of course, this study made a big impact in scientific circles, and ignited a chorus of think pieces addressing why disruptive science is declining. One common theme among these was the corporatization of science and the emphasis on volume of citations for young scientists to obtain grant funding and promotion. As pointed out by Bhattacharya et al., the push for evidence of productivity incentivizes scientists to publish incremental work and concentrates the volume of scientific effort on ideas that have already been established [3]. Similarly, Derek Thompson points out that scientists are not incentivized to submit grant proposals on entirely new ideas given the tight competition to obtain a grant and the high risk of failure [4]. Instead, scientists submit grants that are ‘optimally new’: new enough to secure a grant, but safe enough to secure publication.

Together, all these influences have created a surplus of papers designed to advance careers, not science, and it seems that medical trainees have certainly picked up on this trend. There’s been a steady decline in the number of trainees opting for the physician-scientist pathway, as well as a decline in the number of physician-scientists participating in biomedical research in their careers [5]. At the same time, there’s been increasing interest among PhD graduate students in leaving academia entirely [6-8].

I would argue that for a large percentage of trainees, corporatization has sucked the joy from science. The maxim to ‘publish or perish’ and exhausting competition over limited funding makes it almost impossible to enjoy the process of discovery and keep joyful curiosity about the work of science. Small wonder then that medical trainees view research as a box to check for their application, a menial task for career enhancement rather than an exploration of the human condition. As one trainee put it, research has indeed become ‘boring’.

So how do we put the joy back into science? Revision of the funding model would certainly help. Calls to fund careers of promising young scientists without ties to the success of a specific project abound. Increased support from institutions to cover gaps in grant funding and less emphasis on citations for promotion, among many others, have been proposed. Whether there is the will power to enact these changes remains to be seen.

1.       Russell J. Funk, Jason Owen-Smith (2016) A Dynamic Network Measure of Technological Change. Management Science 63(3):791-817. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2015.2366

2.       Park, M., Leahey, E. & Funk, R.J. Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time. Nature 613, 138–144 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05543-x

3.       Bhattacharya, Jayanta and Packalen, Mikko. Stagnation and Scientific Incentives (February 2020). NBER Working Paper No. w26752, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3539319

4.       Thompson, D. The Consolidation-Disruption Index is Alarming. https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/01/academia-research-scientific-papers-progress/672694/

5.       Garrison, H. H., & Ley, T. J. (2022). Physician‐scientists in the United States at 2020: Trends and concerns. The FASEB Journal, 36(5).

6.       Chen, S. (2021). Leaving academia: why do doctoral graduates take up non-academic jobs and to what extent are they prepared?. Studies in Graduate and Postdoctoral Education, 12(3), 338-352.

7.       Hunter, K. H., & Devine, K. (2016). Doctoral students’ emotional exhaustion and intentions to leave academia. International Journal of doctoral studies, 11(2), 35-61.

8.       Kis, A., Tur, E. M., Lakens, D., Vaesen, K., & Houkes, W. (2022). Leaving academia: PhD attrition and unhealthy research environments. Plos one, 17(10), e0274976.