Another reason may be that “there is increasing pressure in academia to publish, publish, publish, because that is the metric on which academics are assessed,” he said.
The researchers called for universities and funding agencies to focus more on quality rather than quantity and to consider full subsidies for year-long sabbaticals to allow academics to read and think more deeply.
“We are not getting any less innovative as a species,” Park insisted, pointing to recent breakthroughs such as the use of mRNA technology in Covid-19 vaccines, or the measurement of gravitational waves in 2015.
Jérôme Lamy, a historian and specialist in the sociology of science at France’s CNRS research agency who was not involved in the research, said it showed that “over-specialization” and the pressure to publish had increased over the years.
He blamed the global trend of academics being “forced to slice their papers” in order to increase the number of their publications, adding that this resulted in a “slowdown of research”.