Source: Marginal REVOLUTION
A new analysis shows that breakthrough discoveries are increasingly confined to their discipline of origin rather than spreading across fields as they did in the 1980s. This reversal of cross-disciplinary diffusion likely reflects the explosive growth of specialized research communities, paywall-protected journals, and the professionalization of academia into siloed expertise. A biologist may never encounter a relevant breakthrough from materials science, and solutions to problems in one field remain invisible to researchers in another who could apply them.