Does science advance one funeral at a time?

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Fishnut
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Does science advance one funeral at a time?

Post by Fishnut » Sun Nov 17, 2019 9:34 am

A new study has tested Planck's maxim that,
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die,and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
It's a really long paper, published in the American Economic Review, and is open access but there's a good summary of the paper here for those, like me, unable to face 29 pages of dense text on a sunday morning.

The authors looked at the work of "superstar" biologists in the US - ones that had lots of papers, lots of citations, lots of funding, lots of accolades, and then looked at what happened to their field after they died and compared with superstars who carried on working during the time period.
But as the years passed, breaking the numbers down by author showed a startling change: Papers by newcomers grew by 8.6 percent annually on average. At the same time, papers published by collaborators took a nosedive, decreasing by about 20 percent a year. After five years, growth from newcomers was so substantial, it made up for the deficit from the collaborators. In other words, large swaths of these fields had essentially been turned over.
The researchers weren't able to determine if the newcomers were actually overturning the work of the deceased superstars or just continuing it, but they did find that their research drew on a broader range of ideas than the superstars,
Intriguingly, newcomers referenced more work outside the subfield than usual, and they were also much less likely to cite work from the star who had died. “It’s still recognizably the same subfield,” says Azoulay, “but they are injecting it with different ideas.”
The reasons for this are unclear but the article suggests many reasons, from direct gatekeeping to people not bothering to work on ideas that might not get traction to journal editors having to take the new ideas due to the loss of papers by the deceased superstar and their colleagues.

We often like to think of science as this grand endeavour that is above petty human egos, that evidence is king and that good ideas with usurp bad ones, but this sort of research shows it's much more complicated than that.
it's okay to say "I don't know"

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lurk
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Re: Does science advance one funeral at a time?

Post by lurk » Sun Nov 17, 2019 10:44 am

You are being charged with a violation of Betteridge's Law!

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