I don't understand their methodology at all. Considering that the frequency of awarding nobel prizes remains the same , there is nothing that can be infered fro

I don't understand their methodology at all. Considering that the frequency of awarding nobel prizes remains the same , there is nothing that can be infered from their survey. That said i agree with the premise of their article that science is not living up to expectations, and i believe this started somewhere in the 90s. For example consider the recent "Burden of disease" survey which was linked here a few days ago: > GBD 2017 is disturbing. Not only do the amalgamated global figures show a worrying slowdown in progress but the more granular data unearths exactly how patchy progress has been. GBD 2017 is a reminder that, without vigilance and constant effort, progress can easily be reversed. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)32858-7/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... This effect was probably many years in the making , and is only now becoming apparent. One possible explanation for the "sluggishness" in scientific output is that nowadays it is lacking new grand ambitious projects, in other words centralization and Big Science. The proliferation of PhDs has changed the way funding is allocated in recent decades for purely political reasons. It favors thousands of small grants that go to individual independent researchers who are all studying minute effects, are looking for results that barely pass the significance threshold and are publishing in order to build publication records to advance their career. The total number of researchers has doubled since the 80s , therefore this model may be actually detrimental to the process of scientific knowledge discovery at this time. For example, in my field of computational neuroscience, there is currently no equivalent of the "large hadron collider" project for the brain. Some years ago one such project, the 'Human brain project' was proposed and funded, which had a specific and ambitious goal: to simulate the entire brain. Academic politics however fundamentally altered the project and it is now a funding source for various kinds of ordinary research. To be clear, the project was probably ill-conceived from the start (imho), given that we don't have enough info to simulate the brain correctly, but regardless it was one of the few such efforts towards a singular ambitious goal. Subsequent funding schemes such as the US Brain initiative do not have such a focus. The ones who do undertake big science are private institutes like the Allen institute in their attempt to accurately map the entire brain. In any case i think public policy has to focus less on academia and more on science, in order to make progress otherwise we are bound to see detrimental effects a few years down the road.