Millions of scientific papers are published around the world every year. These papers in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine present discoveries ranging from the mundane to the profound.
author
David P. Baker
Professor of Sociology, Education, and Demography, Pennsylvania State University
Justin J.W. Powell
Professor of Sociology of Education, University of Luxembourg
Since 1900, the number of scientific papers published has doubled approximately every 10 to 15 years. Since 1980, it has been about 8% to 9% each year. This acceleration reflects the vast and ever-expanding scope of research across countless topics, from the edges of the universe to the complexity of life on Earth and human nature.
Derek de Sola Price wrote an influential book on the growth rate of science. De Sola Price Family/Wikimedia Commons
However, this extraordinary expansion was once thought to be unsustainable. Derek de Sola Price, the founder of scientometrics, the data informatics associated with scientific publications, wrote in his seminal 1963 book Little Science, Big Science…and Beyond. He is famous for predicting the limits to the growth of science.
He warned that the world would soon run out of resources and talent pools for research. He imagined that this would lead to fewer new discoveries and a potential crisis in medicine, technology, and the economy. At the time, scholars widely accepted his predictions of an impending slowdown in scientific progress.
wrong prediction
In fact, science has spectacularly eclipsed Price’s dire predictions. Instead of stagnating, the world is now experiencing “global megascience,” a vast and ever-growing network of scientific discoveries. This explosion in scientific production made Price’s prediction of collapse perhaps the most spectacularly wrong prediction in scientific research.
Unfortunately, Price died in 1983, too soon to realize his mistake.
So what explains the sustained and dramatic increase in the world’s scientific research capacity?
We are sociologists who study higher education and science. Our new book, Global Megascience: Universities, Research Cooperation, and Knowledge Production, published on the 60th anniversary of Price’s doomsaying, describes this rapid and sustained growth in science. Trace the history of scientific discoveries worldwide.
There is no doubt that factors such as economic growth, war, the space race, and geopolitical competition have accelerated research capacity. However, these factors alone cannot explain the enormous scale of today’s scientific enterprise.
Educational Revolution: The Secret Engine of Science
In many ways, the world’s scientific capacity has been built on the educational aspirations of young people pursuing higher education.
Over the past 125 years, the increasing demand for and access to higher education has sparked a global education revolution. More than two-fifths of the world’s 19-23 year olds are currently enrolled in higher education, although there are large regional differences. This revolution is the engine that drives scientific research capabilities.
Today, more than 38,000 universities and other higher education institutions around the world play an important role in scientific discovery. The educational mission supports the research mission with both public and private funds, and a large portion of student tuition goes toward faculty support.
These faculty scientists balance teaching with conducting extensive research. University-based scientists contribute between 80% and 90% of the discoveries that are published in millions of papers each year.
External research funding remains essential for additional support of specialized equipment, supplies, and research time. However, the everyday research capabilities of universities, especially academics working in teams, form the basis of global scientific progress.
Even the most generous national scientific and commercial research and development budgets cannot fully maintain the basic infrastructure and staffing required for ongoing scientific discovery.
Similarly, government laboratories and independent research institutes such as the US National Institutes of Health and Germany’s Max Planck Institute could not replace the production capacity provided by universities.
Collaboration benefits science and society
The past few decades have also seen a surge in global scientific cooperation. These arrangements leverage diverse talent from around the world to enhance the quality of research.
International collaborations have resulted in millions of co-authored papers. Prior to 1980, international research collaborations were relatively rare, with just over 7,000 papers published that year, or about 2% of the world total. But by 2010, that number had jumped to 440,000 papers. This means that 22% of the world’s scientific publications result from international collaborations.
This growth, built on the “dividends of collaboration”, continues today and has proven to produce some of the most impactful research.
These collaborations are relatively easy because universities tend to share academic goals with other universities and have wide networks and open cultures.
Today, universities also play a key role in international super-collaborations involving teams of hundreds or even thousands of scientists. These large-scale collaborations allow researchers to tackle big problems that would be impossible in smaller groups with fewer resources.
Supercollaborations have facilitated breakthroughs in understanding the complex physics of the universe and the synthesis of evolution and genetics that could never have been achieved by scientists from one country alone.
Role of global hub
With hubs made up of universities around the world, scientific research has been thoroughly globalized. The first of these global hubs, consisting of dozens of North American research universities, began in the 1970s. In the 1980s, it expanded to Europe and more recently to Southeast Asia.
These regional hub-university partnerships connect scientists from hundreds of universities to advance collaborative research projects.
Scientists at these universities often cross geopolitical boundaries, with Iranian researchers publishing with Americans, Germans collaborating with Russians and Ukrainians, and Chinese scientists collaborating with Japanese. He is conducting research with Korean scientists.
The COVID-19 pandemic has clearly demonstrated the enormous scale of international cooperation in global megascience. Within just six months of the start of the pandemic, scientists around the world have already published 23,000 scientific studies on the virus. These studies contributed to the rapid development of effective vaccines.
With the growing global network of universities, collaborations can spread across the world through major research centers.
Is global megascience sustainable?
But despite the impressive growth in scientific output, this brand of highly collaborative, transnational megascience faces challenges.
On the other hand, birth rates are declining in many countries that produce a lot of science. However, despite some recent progress in the Global South, many young people around the world, especially those in low-income countries, have less access to higher education.
Sustaining this global cooperation and high scientific output means expanding access to higher education. This is because funds from higher education subsidize research costs and higher education trains the next generation of scientists.
Mr. De Sola Price could not have predicted that universities would become so important in promoting science around the world. For better or worse, the future of scientific production is tied to the future of these institutions.
David Baker receives funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Fulbright, FNR Luxembourg, and the Qatar National Research Fund.
Justin JW Powell has received funding for research in higher education and science from Germany’s BMBF, DFG, and VolkswagenStiftung. FNR of Luxembourg. and QNRF in Qatar.
/Courtesy of The Conversation. This material from the original organization/author may be of a contemporary nature and has been edited for clarity, style, and length. Mirage.News does not take any institutional position or position, and all views, positions, and conclusions expressed herein are solely those of the authors.
