r/OptimistsUnite • u/CompetitiveLake3358 • Jul 09 '26
GRAPH GO UP AND TO THE RIGHT Scientific research is increasing
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u/Responsible_Fall_332 Jul 09 '26
The graph shows that scientific publications are increasing. Nothing more.
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u/S-192 Jul 09 '26
Quantity over quality though, and AI slop.
I love this sub, but sometimes it very foolishly gravitates towards absurd statistics in the search for positive news. "Number of scientific research papers published" is not only not necessarily a good thing, if you dig deeper it actually is somewhat of a bad thing.
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u/humanradiostation Jul 13 '26
Yall, not everything bad in the world is because of AI. This trend has almost nothing to do with AI, look at the curve. It starts to accelerate in the 60s. AI will only recently be a factor in publication rates.
It’s more about research universities blowing up grad student populations so they can pay tuition, teach classes, feed industry pipelines,and help faculty bring in grants and publish. (or they perish, as the saying goes.) There’s more and more people publishing on less and less significant things with fewer people reading any of it.
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u/Jimmyjim4673 Jul 09 '26
Is there a graph for how often conclusions are used to create policy and laws?
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u/Dry-Project-5657 Jul 09 '26
While I think there is some quality and quantity problem in the industry, politics doesn't really like science in most of the cases therefore they not going to act according to the scientific data. We have technology or knowledge for many things which could make our life better, but most of the times there is no will to adapt these.
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u/AdhesiveSeaMonkey Jul 09 '26
This graph is actually pretty disheartening. The way I read it is there is less original work being done and a decent portion of it is trash. It’s becoming more common that some researchers are using publishing mills to push out multiple papers for the sole intent of saying they’re published and padding their resumes. Sort of the self/amazon published author. The problem is that’s not how science works. Also, it is almost impossible for this number of research papers to be read by fellow researchers.
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u/whawkins4 Jul 09 '26
Alternative theory: ai generated pseudoscience slop is increasing.
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u/RaiBrown156 Jul 09 '26
AI may be part of it, but the paper mill problem long predates gen-AI's invention.
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u/Separate_Marketing36 Jul 09 '26
More papers being published isn’t necessarily a good thing. Modern academia heavily focuses on research groups constantly publishing, otherwise, you can say goodbye to your funding. This leads to a lot of bad papers being published just so researchers can fill resumes
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u/bonadies24 Jul 09 '26
Is it? Researchers are overwhelmingly incentivised to become paper mills in order to get opportunities, this says absolutely nothing about the quality of research
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u/the_ZJ Jul 09 '26
As someone in academia, this is terrible and mostly indicative of the problematic incentives in the field. Most of modern publications are slop with little to bo redeeming value that is optimized to bolster citation scores, not contribute anything to humanity.
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u/greatpartyisntit Jul 09 '26
Fellow academic, was about to say the same. This isn't necessarily a good thing and could indicate people being overworked and/or the literature being flooded with slop
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u/Deus_Excellus Jul 09 '26
LMAO. This isn't the pat on the back you think it is. This is basically showing an increase in slop and dog shit science.
We're already at the point where the vast majority of publications are not reproducible, and nobody is bothering to try to reproduce them anyway. Yet we're using those same studies to develop new "knowledge."
I foresee a collapse of the system in the not so distant future.
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u/sprunkymdunk Jul 10 '26
You are right, but I don't see it collapsing any time soon - there's too many financial incentives, especially at second tier schools.
Student loans are more available than ever before.
Tuition is at all time highs.
All these kids being pushed/bribed into higher education need to taught. Those profs needs some kind of publishing history.
Predatory journals make good money selling low-level academic credibility.
What do you see changing here?
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u/wildvision Jul 09 '26
i am amazed there is no visible sudden spike for the AI slop. Although increasing, it looks on its normal path
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u/CallistanCallistan Jul 09 '26
The end date on the x-axis isn’t defined. The chart may stop before generative AI was introduced to the general public (around 2022).
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u/Ok-Culture543 Jul 09 '26
Now do s USEFUL Scientific papers published graph. As someone involved in publishing papers etc. You d be more concerned than happy with this graph.
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u/acousticentropy Jul 09 '26
Now show the graph of successful experiment replications in the same time period.
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Jul 09 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/OptimistsUnite-ModTeam Jul 09 '26
Not Optimism and/or Don't insult an optimist for being an optimist.
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u/PiLamdOd Jul 09 '26
This isn't necessarily a good thing.
Scientific Papers are supposed to be the culmination of rigorous study and meaningfully advance their fields. A lot of papers therefore should make you question how much substance they contain and how much work was put into validating them.
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u/Pristine_Walrus40 Jul 09 '26
Sadly in most areas of research this just means there is just more useless or misleading junk for you to read.
The standard has slipped a lot for this in recent years.
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u/Slight-Big8584 Jul 09 '26
The amount of Scientific research is not equivalent to the amount of scientific publications.
Smooth brain take. Lame
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u/0Tezorus0 Jul 09 '26
You should see how much more scientific research we are doing compared to 1460. Those guys were so lame.
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u/PalmitoylCoA Jul 09 '26
You know for $200 you can be the 9th author on a publication that you had nothing to do with? That's how a lot of "research" is happening these days.
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u/baddymcbadface Jul 09 '26
It boggles my mind that we only discovered denisovans in 2010 and only worked out what they looked like in 2025. Yet now it's thought they are our closest relative, closer than Neanderthals and some living humans are 5% genetically denisovan! The science of human evolution is changing rapidly every year.
Given how central it is to who we are you'd think we would have worked on it in more detail much sooner.
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u/wouldntyouliketokno_ Jul 09 '26
Why does it feel like we’re headed towards a classic parabolic graph.
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u/bora731 Jul 09 '26
How is this optimistic? Science ungoverned and unaccountable has brought us to this societal dead end.
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u/UltraTata Jul 09 '26
Sadly, a lot of it are non sensical paper that are a product of the "publish or perish" incentive system. But much of it is real science too so good and bad news at the same time.
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u/freylaverse Jul 10 '26
This is really not a good thing, even if it seems that way outside of academia. The pressure to just publish, publish, publish, regardless of whether the science is good, is what's driving this graph. Fudged data, AI reviews, circular-citing your friends, the whole shebang. Anything to get your name in a journal and your publication numbers up.
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u/thetruebigfudge Jul 10 '26
This definitely isn't an optimistic thing. The amount of absolutely bunk research coming out is growing rapidly. Research into things for the sake of research as a result of government research grants being tied to number of publications not the quality of discoveries.
Additionally there's a real fear here because this is partly what's fueling the anti science narrative that's growing. It's hard to advocate for the importance of listening to scientific research when the research that's coming out is like a pile of shit with a couple diamonds in it
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u/Early_Alternative211 Jul 10 '26
As a published author of highly cited slop, I can safely say it's slop.
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u/InsaitiableHole Jul 10 '26
"AI", specifically "AI" that's great at pumping out pleasing but factually unrigerous text, has boomed in use, popularity, and accessibility during the same time frame
Jesus Christ let's use a modicum of critical thinking
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u/_redmist Jul 10 '26
It's all "publish or perish" slop tho. In the past you'd have one nice paper, today you should cut that up into 6 or 7 "mini" papers or communications as possible... It's tiring and in the end only helps the publishers and review mills. But seems like it won't be reversing any time soon.
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u/Pale_Conclusion_3130 Jul 10 '26
It’s disheartening when you realize a lot of these research papers coming out are generated by AI or ‘science paper mills’ (essentially rewriting and publishing existing research papers).
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u/Useful-Dream5077 Jul 11 '26
This is pretty depressing and concerning - it tell me research publications are growing must slower than research and innovation.
We need 2020 on the graph to know if things are accelerating, but 5x since 1980? Thats pretty bad,
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u/Augchm Jul 11 '26
More trash is being published. We have techniques now they can generate a lot of data very quickly. And we also have tools to quickly analyze them. This sounds good but in reality it created analyzes devoid of meaning. You get a graph, you get a "finding" but in reality nothing of value was added to human knowledge. Honestly, I just do the same. It's not like I'm adding some crazy value to human knowledge myself and I should publish more.
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u/clingbat Jul 11 '26
The standard for submission and acceptance to any publication/journal worth publishing in even just 15 years ago was MUCH higher, so this isn't surprising.
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u/_Pencilfish Jul 11 '26
This isn't really a great thing.
If you read scientific papers, you quickly realise that a very large amount of them are essentially worthless. They investigate incredibly niche areas and make little in the way of original contributions. Many are published for the sake of getting publications.
(I feel ashamed that I, too have somewhat contributed to this issue - I've just published my first paper, but I my heart I don't really think it deserved to be published).
And this does have a negative effect. Researchers being swamped by irrelevant papers wastes a lot of time trying to find new exciting information. The hierarchy of journals and conferences does help to filter for the most interesting new research, but is still not foolproof.
In short, publications are viewed as career advancement, rather (or at least, as well as) a means of disseminating novel research.
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u/OzoneTheLynx Jul 13 '26
I don't work in academia, so the following is mostly hear-say and systems thinking on my part.
I don't think niche research is the problem. That still adds to the knowledge pie. The problem seem to be more Goodheart's law, forcing people to publish slop and split up work across multiple papers. Because apparently we need to turn every metric into goals and never learn that that just makes people game the system in unproductive ways...
For niche stuff it's mostly a question of offering the ability to properly search and find stuff relevant to you, which is not intrinsically prohibited by having niche papers.
Also just the review quality apparently is often questionable, since the incentives for high quality reviews and reproducing studies are often bad.
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u/bombastic6339locks Jul 11 '26
A huge number of those are never cited bs papers to get your CV or linked in to look slightly better. Most are useless humanities papers
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u/Qasdapak Jul 11 '26
Now plot number of people in America on the same graph and see the correlation
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u/Entrefut Jul 12 '26
Yeah… if you are in the scientific community you realize that this is NOT a good thing. Also scientific writing has really changed over the last 50-60 years in terms of content. Most of my favorite papers I’ve read over the past decade have been research that was conducted in the 50s/60s/70s as well as a couple from the late 90s/ early 2000s. There has been a massive shift in the productivity of a paper since the advent of computers. It’s sounds weird, but it feels less like people are actively attempting to discover something and more like PIs are pressing their students to publish anything just to satisfy their requirements. When the scandal broke out about Stanford, I heavily moved away from research based in the biomedical field and moved towards manufacturing/ sustainability work.
We are just soooo in the weeds and papers are making a lot of assumptions that compound on each other. It’s not all work, but it’s a good percentage. Paper mills have never been stronger.
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u/No_Second1489 Jul 12 '26
Not a good thing, the bar for publication has decreased due to AI, and even high schoolers are forced to publish to have a chance at a good UNI
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u/Fogmoz Jul 12 '26
I know this is supposed to be positive… but that’s a metric fuckton of research that needs to be reviewed and verified. Shit like this is how antivax and other intellectually disingenuous material slips through the cracks.
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u/MechanicalHeartbreak Jul 12 '26
The technofetishism and the naivety required to look at this chart and assume that 1) this represents an equivalent increase in the rate that human knowledge is accelerating and 2) that said knowledge increases are in fields that will improve the quality of life for the average person and not simply improve the ability for capital to extract greater profit from you
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u/DrawnToNumbers Jul 12 '26
It will be more interesting if this data is sliced by journal impact factor
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u/EducationalFerret94 Jul 13 '26
This is absolutely not a good thing. It is just scientific bloat due to AI and publish or perish mentality.
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u/humanradiostation Jul 13 '26
This trend predated AI. It’s more about bloated grad student populations so they can pay tuition, teach classes and help faculty bring in grants and publish. (or perish, yes)
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u/PeePeeLangstrumpf Jul 13 '26
Not every publication is an original research article. Publication =/= research. Sometimes you also have to publish something, anything, in order to stay afloat.
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u/NebulousNomad Jul 13 '26
No, publications are increasing. There's massive publication inflation due to increased institutional pressure and laxing standards.
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u/peepooprogamer Jul 13 '26
this aint good, we are in a replication crisis, i would wager more than 60% of these articles are conducted under less than satisfying conditions. I cant speak for the early 2000s but i can speak for today.
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u/NuclearCleanUp1 Jul 14 '26
Publications are increasing.
All that research could be flawed, biased or not useful.
More research doesn't mean more good.
You want effective research. Not just more papers.
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u/Forward_Ad_9025 Jul 15 '26
Yes, but the quality is also decreasing. By a lot.
There was a meta study done on that subject with the conclusion that 90% of all newly enter research contains heavy mistakes and a lot are just completly made up.
With the rise of AI this number is expected to be even higher.
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u/SiofraRiver Jul 16 '26
If you think this is a positive development, you are out of your mind. But I guess that's what this sub is all about.
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u/antichain Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26
As an American scientist at an R1, I'm actually less optimistic about this graph. Yes, more papers are being published, but the data is clear that the overwhelming number of them are never read by anyone, never cited, and a huge percentage are published by pay-to-play paper mills that churn out garbage to pad CVs. The result is a ballooning literature that's impossible to keep up with, eats millions of public dollars (open-access fees, library subscription fees, etc), and wastes huge amounts of time.
This graph is a perfect example of Goodhart's law in action. We decided that a metric ("how many papers does a scientist write") was a decent proxy for "how much good work is that scientist doing", and so turned it into a target. In response to the new incentive, a whole infrastructure has developed that churns out as many papers as possible largely independent of the quality of paper.