Rethinking scientific progress in the social sciences: disruptive or cumulative?

Abstract

This paper offers a critical reassessment of claims that scientific progress is best understood through the disruptiveness of new research. Park, Leahey and Funk in Nature (2023) have re-opened the debate by presenting results using the citation-based ‘CD index’ to assess the extent to which individual academic publications are consolidating or disruptive. Analyzing Park et al. as a focal point of these claims, we challenge the adequacy of this approach to capture both genuine scientific disruption and scientific progress, particularly within the social sciences. Drawing on philosophy and sociology of science, we show that scientific progress is predominantly cumulative rather than disruptive, and that papers’ high disruptiveness scores may often reflect phenomena such as pseudo-novelty or fragmentation rather than true epistemic breakthroughs. Our analysis demonstrates that in fields marked by intellectual pluralism and weak paradigmatic consensus, apparent disruptiveness may be an artifact of scholarly practices rather than an indication of substantive innovation. Hence, measures of disruptiveness appear ill-suited as a marker of scientific progress – as used in individual and collective research evaluations. Instead, we advance a constructive agenda by proposing that scientific progress is best conceptualized not as a dichotomy between cumulation and disruptiveness, but as a multi-dimensional process embracing elements of both disruption and consolidation within an overarching cumulative trajectory, whereby established knowledge is iteratively refined, rejected, or recombined in the light of new evidence or insight. By rethinking how scientific advancement is measured and cultivated, and suggesting ways to foster cumulative scientific progress, this article contributes to the theory and practice of research evaluation.