Fascinating read that collects several pieces of evidence to suggest “that it is increasingly challenging to make discoveries that have comparable impact to the ones in the past“.
Consider this chart, for example.
It is based on all citations made to academic papers by US patents filed that year (and eventually granted in the next five years).
The chart shows the percentage of these citations that were papers published in the preceding five years.
The result – “citations to recent work have become increasingly less common“.
The rest of the evidence is in this vein, including especially interesting data on how new topics in science are stagnating. This has a nice corollary to this essay here (for progress we need novel things to work on, h/t The Diff).
