A recent highly-publicized study by Park et al. (Nature 613: 138-144, 2023), claiming that science has become less disruptive over recent decades, represents an extraordinary achievement but with deceptive results. The measure of disruption, CD-5, in this study does not account for differences in citation amid decades of exponential growth in publication rate. In order to account for both the exponential growth as well as the differential impact of research works over time, here we apply a weighted disruption index to the same dataset. We find that, among research papers in the dataset, this weighted disruption index has been close to its expected neutral value over the last fifty years and has even increased modestly since 2000. We also show how the proportional decrease in unique words (highlighted by Park et al. (2023) is expected in an exponentially growing corpus. Finding little evidence for recent decrease in disruption, we suggest that it is actually increasing.

翻译：一项由Park等人发表于《自然》杂志（Nature 613: 138-144, 2023）的近期高影响力研究声称，近几十年来科学的突破性程度有所下降。该研究虽取得了卓越成就，但得出了具有误导性的结论。该研究采用的破坏性指数（CD-5）未能考虑过去数十年间论文发表量呈指数增长背景下引文分布差异的影响。为同时校正指数增长与科研成果时效性差异，我们采用加权破坏性指数对相同数据集进行分析。结果发现，该数据集中研究论文的加权破坏性指数在过去五十年间始终接近预期中性值，且自2000年以来呈现温和上升趋势。我们还证明，Park等人（2023）强调的独特词汇比例下降现象，在指数增长语料中本属预期结果。鉴于近期破坏性指数下降的证据不足，我们认为实际趋势应为上升。