Groundbreaking research and disruption: Empirical results on the correlation between assessments of groundbreaking research by peers and disruption index scores

The study by Park et al. (2023), which found that disruptive innovations in science have been
declining since the end of World War II, triggered a public debate about an apparent lack of
major scientific achievements in the modern science system. However, could it be that not all
important contributions to the progress of science are captured as “disruptive” by the metric
used by Park et al. (2023)? Their metric, the disruption index, might not be suitable for
identifying major scientific achievements (groundbreaking research). In this study, we tested
whether the disruption index (two variants: DI1, DI5) corresponds with researchers’ self-
assessments of their own work as groundbreaking. The results of the study show that the
researchers define groundbreaking science as research that is novel and important. Furthermore,
the results reveal that the DI1 and the DI5 fail to identify publications that have been defined as
groundbreaking science by the researchers.