Millions of scientific articles are published worldwide every year. These articles in science, technology, engineering, math, and medicine present discoveries that range from the mundane to the profound.
Since 1900, the number of published scientific articles has doubled every ten to fifteen years; since 1980 about 8% to 9% per year. This acceleration reflects the immense and ever-expanding scope of research on countless topics, from the furthest reaches of the cosmos to the complexities of life on Earth and human nature.
Yet this extraordinary expansion was once thought to be unsustainable. In his influential 1963 book, “Little Science, Big Science… And Beyond,” the founder of scientometrics – or data informatics related to scientific publishing – Derek de Solla Price famously predicted the limits to scientific growth.
He warned that the world would soon exhaust its resources and talent pool for research. He imagined that this would lead to a decrease in new discoveries and potential crises in medicine, technology and economics. At the time, scientists widely accepted his prediction of an impending slowdown in scientific progress.
Wrong predictions
In fact, science has defied Price’s dire prediction in spectacular fashion. Instead of stagnation, the world is now experiencing ‘global megascience’ – a vast, ever-expanding network of scientific discoveries. This explosion of scientific production made Price’s prediction of the collapse perhaps the most stunningly incorrect prediction in the study of science.
Sadly, Price died in 1983, too early to realize his mistake.
What, then, explains the continued and dramatically increasing capacity for scientific research in the world?
We are sociologists who study higher education and science. Our new book, “Global Mega-Science: Universities, Research Collaborations, and Knowledge Production,” published on the 60th anniversary of Price’s fateful prediction, offers explanations for this rapid and sustained scientific growth. It traces the history of scientific discoveries worldwide.
Factors such as economic growth, warfare, space races and geopolitical competition have undoubtedly boosted research capacity. But these factors alone cannot explain the immense scale of the current scientific enterprise.
The education revolution: the secret engine of science
In many ways, the world’s scientific capacity is built on the educational aspirations of young adults pursuing higher education.
Over the past 125 years, increasing demand for and access to higher education has led to a global education revolution. Now more than two-fifths of young people in the world between the ages of 19 and 23 are in higher education, although there are major regional differences. This revolution is the driving force behind scientific research capacity.
Today, more than 38,000 universities and other higher education institutions worldwide play a crucial role in scientific discovery. The education mission, both publicly and privately funded, subsidizes the research mission, with a large portion of student tuition going to supporting faculty.
These faculty scientists balance their teaching with conducting extensive research. University scientists contribute 80% to 90% of the discoveries published in millions of papers each year.
External research funding is still essential for specialized equipment, supplies and additional support for research time. But the day-to-day research capacity of universities, and especially of academics working in teams, is the foundation of global scientific progress.
Even the most generous national scientific and commercial research and development budgets cannot fully support the basic infrastructure and personnel needed for continued scientific discovery.
Likewise, government laboratories and independent research institutes, such as the US National Institutes of Health or Germany’s Max Planck Institute, could not replace the production capacity that universities provide.
Collaboration benefits science and society
In recent decades there has also been a strong increase in global scientific cooperation. These schemes utilize diverse talent from around the world to improve the quality of research.
International collaborations have led to millions of co-authored articles. International research partnerships were relatively rare before 1980, accounting for just over 7,000 articles, or about 2% of global output that year. But by 2010, that number had risen to 440,000 articles, meaning that 22% of the world’s scientific publications are the result of international collaborations.
This growth, building on the ‘collaboration dividend’, continues today and has produced research with the greatest impact.
Universities tend to share academic goals with other universities and have broad networks and a culture of openness, making these collaborations relatively easy.
Today, universities also play a key role in international super-collaborations involving teams of hundreds or even thousands of scientists. In these massive collaborations, researchers can tackle important questions that they would not be able to solve in smaller groups with fewer resources.
Supercollaborations have enabled breakthroughs in understanding the complex physics of the universe and the synthesis of evolution and genetics that scientists in one country could never achieve alone.
The role of global hubs
Hubs made up of universities from around the world have made scientific research thoroughly global. The first of these global hubs, consisting of dozens of North American research universities, began in the 1970s. They expanded to Europe in the 1980s and most recently to Southeast Asia.
These regional hubs and university alliances connect scientists from hundreds of universities to pursue joint research projects.
Scientists at these universities have often crossed geopolitical boundaries: Iranian researchers published papers with Americans, Germans collaborated with Russians and Ukrainians, and Chinese scientists collaborated with their Japanese and Korean counterparts.
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 had already published 23,000 scientific studies on the virus. These studies have contributed to the rapid development of effective vaccines.
As global networks of universities expand, partnerships can spread to all parts of the world through major research centers.
Is global megascience sustainable?
But despite the impressive growth in scientific output, this type of highly collaborative and transnational megascience faces challenges.
On the one hand, birth rates are declining in many science-producing countries. On the other hand, many young people around the world, especially those in low-income countries, have less access to higher education, although some progress has been made recently in the Global South.
Sustaining this global cooperation and high level of scientific output will mean expanding access to higher education. That’s because higher education funds subsidize research costs, and higher education trains the next generation of scientists.
De Solla Price could not have predicted how integral universities would be in driving global science. For better or worse, the future of scientific production is tied to the future of these institutions.
This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit organization providing facts and trusted analysis to help you understand our complex world. It was written by: David P. Baker, Penn State and Justin J. W. Powell, University of Luxembourg
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David Baker receives funding from the US National Science Foundation, US National Institutes of Health, Fulbright, FNR Luxembourg and the Qatar Nation Research Fund.
Justin JW Powell has received research funding in higher education and science from Germany’s BMBF, DFG, and VolkswagenStiftung; Luxembourg FNR; and Qatar’s QNRF.