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Comment by contravariant | Hacker News Reader

If the low hanging fruit is gone and producing profound results requires more effort you'd expect the number of papers to decrease, or at least it wouldn't be appropriate to use number of papers as a metric because producing good papers requires exceedingly large amounts of efforts and possibly luck.

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While that seems reasonable, it assumes the amount of impact per paper has remained constant, while is practice it has greatly declined. These days scientists will literally try to identify the set of "least publishable units" in a research project to maximize the number of papers (I've attended meetings where this is discussed without irony). There is also a tendency to publish work that is quite similar to previous work with a minor change that is emphasized disproportionately to its importance.

Part of it is also the fields are much larger. Both internationally of course, but also on a national level. Almost 150 R1 schools in the US now. More grant funded work is being done than ever before. More agencies funding research both public and private as well. More papers than ever submitted to more journals than ever by more people than ever, year after year.

Yes, I would expect amount of work per paper to stay roughly constant in a healthy research community. The whole point of writing papers should be to communicate what you did and found so that others don't have to do the same thing, and I think the amount of work would be the relevant variable that determines the amount of information that has to be transferred.

Not if the scientists involved are p-hacking. Or, less harmfully, publishing null results.

Surely you mean _not_ publishing null results? From what I understand, null results are just as scientifically important to publish as alternative results, they just aren't published as often because they aren't as exciting.

Publishing null results is the opposite of harmful

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