"New ideas no longer fuel economic growth the way they once did. A popular explanation for stagnation is that good ideas are harder to find, rendering slowdown inevitable. We present a simple model of the lifecycle of scientific ideas that points to changes in scientist incentives as the cause of scientific stagnation....As attention given to new ideas decreased, science stagnated...We demonstrate empirically that measures of novelty are correlated with but distinct from measures of scientific impact, which suggests that if also novelty metrics were utilized in scientist evaluation, scientists might pursue more innovative, riskier, projects"
The authors seem to forget that currently more than 40 per cent of global R&D is now performed by just 200 companies and also that patents are a corporation game because only in third-world countries do universities produce more patents than corporations. In rich countries, patent applications from universities represent less than 10% of the overall volume. that means that corporate researchers are not driven by scientific impact (AKA citations) but by profit and profit alone so it seems that the authors are suggesting that researchers in universities should also be driven by the motto "show me the money".
That suggestion, however, has several major problems. First of all it's not true that researchers in academia are driven by citations. No, they are not. At least in some places, they are already driven by funding, GET FUNDED OR DIE that drove a Full Professor of the Imperial College to commit suicide https://pacheco-torgal.blogspot.com/2019/09/imperial-collegegreat-scientists-leave.html and that´s why some many researchers in USA have faked funding applications and universities are now paying hundreds of millions to solve that mess
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/duke-university-pays-112m-settle-faked-research-lawsuit-n987316
Second, the neophilia (disease) suggested by the authors of the paper is already responsible for a rise in science misconduct. See also on this issue https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.171511
And last but not least, if almost all researchers were focused on profit research and there were no incentives for curating science then who´s gone check the quality of corporate science? Who´s gone prevent corporate scandals like the 9 billion Theranos fake patents fraud?
PS - See on this issue an extract below taken from a paper co-authored by the well-known Stanford Professor John Ioannidis that
analyzed almost 50 healthcare-related unicorns (startups with value in excess
of 1 billion) including the Theranos fraud:
“High‐valuation companies that publish little or nothing in the peer‐reviewed
literature may still have patents related to their products. One may
argue that patents undergo rigorous evaluation. However, patents do
not offer the same level of documentation as peer‐reviewed
articles. For example, Theranos had over 100 patents, but these were
unable to supplant the vacuum in their evidence....when a team of investigators
used the Theranos technology to run 22 common lab tests versus the same tests
run with other companies’ technologies, the problematic error rates became
manifest.."
