SCIENCE Acknowledges the Current Lack of Innovation in Research, Nevertheless Forecasting a Bright Future

“Persistently disruptive” publications resulting in paradigm shifts are on the rise—really?

Talk to pretty much any working scientist, and he or she will bring up the lack of opportunity for innovation in their chosen fields. There are many reasons for this, and most of us can name the major ones without thinking about it too deeply: lack of funding for any studies out of the mainstream, the outright dismissal of such studies by establishment science, increasing political correctness, scientific blinders with regard to data outside an individual’s subspecialty, fewer positions with financial security, general closed-mindedness of institutions and recently, across-the-board cuts in research grants for everything from severe weather research to genomics. It’s clear that scientists in all research institutions are running scared—with good reason—a situation not acknowledged by Science but obvious from the pages of any decent lay periodical.

So, with innovation in scientific research obviously becoming a thing of the past, An Zeng and a group of researchers at Beijing Normal University developed a new metric to measure how many “persistently disruptive” studies have been published in the recent past. Using their new method, they determined that persistently disruptive papers increased “about fivefold” between 2000 and 2019. (1)

Zeng and colleagues’ results “add nuance to the narrative, advanced in several previous studies, that innovativeness has declined across many scientific fields because researchers are increasingly reliant on narrow existing knowledge within their subdisciplines,” Science associate news editor Jeffrey Brainard explained. (1)

So, what’s a persistently disruptive paper? In short, it plays a large role in changing an established scientific paradigm. For example, a well known paradigm shift occurred when the Australian research team of Barry Marshall and Robin Warren showed that ulcers, long thought to be caused by stress, actually resulted from a bacterial infection. After the pair identified Helicobacter pylori in 90% of the ulcers they biopsied in 1982, they published their finding in the 1984 Lancet. (2) Their finding met with universal skepticism, which they had to go to extreme efforts to overcome: In 1985, Marshall underwent gastric biopsy to prove he wasn’t infected with H. pylori and subsequently swallowed a solution containing the bacterium, inducing his own ulcer. (3) Their breakthrough slowly became widely accepted and in 2005—23 years later—Marshall and Warren were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine “for their unexpected but paradigm shift discovery.” Even then, scientific journals announced the awarding of the Nobel while asking, “Is the debate over?” (4)

Disruptive papers have long been considered to be, among other characteristics, those that are most frequently cited by other researchers. But Zeng, a researcher in systems science at Beijing Normal University, was puzzled to see that papers dubbed disruptive are not consistently highly cited, as one might expect them to be. In their new study, Zeng and his colleagues sought to identify truly groundbreaking papers that contain trailblazing ideas using a new measure: “persistent disruption.”

According to the calculations performed by the Beijing researchers—starting with records from 1800, continuing through 2019—a truly “persistently disruptive” paper is not necessarily highly cited; it’s persistently disruptive, they determined, if none of the papers citing it overturn its paradigm-busting conclusions. (1)

“Such papers make up an increasing proportion of the literature since 2000, the [Beijing Normal University] researchers found,” Brainard reported. “That result does not contradict previous findings that the share of papers that are disruptive has broadly declined, Zeng says. But, ‘For those papers that do disrupt previous work, they are more likely to be adopted by future work nowadays.’ A possible explanation is that the quality of the disruptive work may be improving, he suggests.” (1)

Zeng conceded that there’s “no formula for determining the optimal balance between disruptive research and work that builds incrementally on previous findings.” And Russell Funk, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities who has also studied scientific disruption, told Science that to solve complex problems that are both societal and scientific, “You might want much higher levels of disruption” than currently exist. (1)

Well, that’s for sure. Let’s look at a few paradigms that need overturning before research can even begin to heal the diseases they currently define:

· HIV causes AIDS.
· Toxic drugs, like AZT (no longer used) and Truvada (whose manufacturer Gilead Sciences is currently being sued by 26,000 patients who’ve suffered “adverse effects” like bone loss so severe that their teeth fall out, as well as too many other adverse effects to list here [5]) should be used not only to treat HIV but also given to completely healthy people for life to stop them from acquiring HIV.
· ME/CFS doesn’t exist other than as a psychological disease of neurotic women.
· Alzheimer’s Disease is caused by mysterious prions that create plaques of aberrant proteins in the brain—however, removing the plaques doesn’t stop disease progression.

I could go on, but I won’t be greedy. Let’s have some disruptive research addressing those four paradigms, none of which has resulted in cures, effective treatments, or halting the growing numbers of new cases of these personal-, family-, and soul-destroying diseases.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Jeffrey Brainard. “Research may be increasingly incremental—but studies making lasting paradigm shifts are on the rise. New metric identifying ‘persistently disruptive’ papers offers a ‘bright spot’ amid signs of declining innovation.” Science May 20, 2025. doi: 10.1126/science.zpuohvm
2. Marshall BJ, Warren RM. “Unidentified curved bacilli in the stomach of patients with gastritis and peptic ulceration.” Lancet. 1984;16:1311–1315. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(84)91816-6. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
3. Marshall BJ, Armstrong JA, McGechie DB, Glancy RJ. “Attempt to fulfill Koch's postulates for pyloric campylobacter.” Medical J Australia. 1985;142:436–439. doi: 10.5694/j.1326-5377.1985.tb113443.x. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
4. Niyaz Ahmed. “23 years of the discovery of Helicobacter pylori: Is the debate over?” Editorial, Ann Clin Microbiol Antimicrob. 2005 Oct 31;4:17. doi: 10.1186/1476-0711-4-17
5. Rebecca Culshaw Smith. “Update on the Truvada Disaster: Over 26,000 plaintiffs in these multiple lawsuits.” The Real AIDS Epidemic, SubStack, May 21, 2025.