The Pace of Scientific Research Is Picking Up | Ijad Madisch

"What’s really going on in science? For centuries there was no real way of knowing. It took months and sometimes years to find out whether a study mattered, in science and in the real world. That’s changing, thanks to the internet.

When I left academia five years ago I was a published scientist and feedback was slow. Most of my articles had appeared around the year 2008, but 2012 was the year I got the most citations from other academic papers. Citations are a proxy for influence in science. If someone’s citing what you wrote it means that it’s getting read and potentially used to further an idea or take it in a new direction. In my case, by the time my work was having influence, I had swapped my lab coat for my laptop and started a company.

There are two explanations for the time lag between publication and influence in science. Perhaps my publications just weren’t getting any attention earlier because I published many of my articles in journals that kept them behind a paywall. It could also be that it took the people who read and cited my work some time to come out with their own papers. It was probably a mix of both. But to at least some degree the dissemination of knowledge was slowed down by the way those papers were published and stored.

The good news is that this lag time is decreasing. Scientists upload their research to ResearchGate, the social network my co-founders and I founded in 2008, which provides us with a large dataset on how scientific process plays out. Here we see that of all articles published in 2010, only 20% had been cited six months later. Of all articles published in 2013, 46% were cited after six months. The cycle of scientific feedback and influence is speeding up...."