---
title: "Metascience"
chunk: 4/7
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metascience"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:44:21.146005+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Metascience can investigate how scientific processes evolve over time. A study found that teams are growing in size, "increasing by an average of 17% per decade". (see labor advantage below)

It was found that prevalent forms of non-open access publication and prices charged for many conventional journals – even for publicly funded papers – are unwarranted, unnecessary – or suboptimal – and detrimental barriers to scientific progress. Open access can save considerable amounts of financial resources, which could be used otherwise, and level the playing field for researchers in developing countries. There are substantial expenses for subscriptions, gaining access to specific studies, and for article processing charges. Paywall: The Business of Scholarship is a documentary on such issues.
Another topic are the established styles of scientific communication (e.g. long text-form studies and reviews) and the scientific publishing practices –  there are concerns about a "glacial pace" of conventional publishing. The use of preprint-servers to publish study-drafts early is increasing and open peer review, new tools to screen studies, and improved matching of submitted manuscripts to reviewers are among the proposals to speed up publication.

==== Science overall and intrafield developments ====

Metadata from research publications can be extracted, enriched, and made widely accessible through digital tools. OpenAlex is a free online index of over 200 million scientific documents that integrates and provides metadata such as sources, citations, author information, scientific fields and research topics. Its API and open source website can be used for metascience, scientometrics and novel tools that query this semantic web of papers. Another project under development, Scholia, uses metadata of scientific publications for various visualizations and aggregation features such as providing a simple user interface summarizing literature about a specific feature of the SARS-CoV-2 virus using Wikidata's "main subject" property.

===== Subject-level resolutions =====
Beyond metadata explicitly assigned to studies by humans, natural language processing and AI can be used to assign research publications to topics – one study investigating the impact of science awards used such to associate a paper's text (not just keywords) with the linguistic content of Wikipedia's scientific topics pages ("pages are created and updated by scientists and users through crowdsourcing"), creating meaningful and plausible classifications of high-fidelity scientific topics for further analysis or navigability.

===== Growth or stagnation of science overall =====

Metascience research is investigating the growth of science overall, using e.g. data on the number of publications in bibliographic databases. A study found segments with different growth rates appear related to phases of "economic (e.g., industrialization)" – money is considered as necessary input to the science system – "and/or political developments (e.g., Second World War)". It also confirmed a recent exponential growth in the volume of scientific literature and calculated an average doubling period of 17.3 years.
However, others have pointed out that is difficult to measure scientific progress in meaningful ways, partly because it's hard to accurately evaluate how important any given scientific discovery is. A variety of perspectives of the trajectories of science overall (impact, number of major discoveries, etc) have been described in books and articles, including that science is becoming harder (per dollar or hour spent), that if science "slowing today, it is because science has remained too focused on established fields", that papers and patents are increasingly less likely to be "disruptive" in terms of breaking with the past as measured by the "CD index", and that there is a great stagnation – possibly as part of a larger trend – whereby e.g. "things haven't changed nearly as much since the 1970s" when excluding the computer and the Internet.
Understanding potential slowdowns in scientific productivity could present opportunities to accelerate research and address humanity's most pressing challenges. For example, emphasis on citations in the measurement of scientific productivity, information overloads, reliance on a narrower set of existing knowledge (which may include narrow specialization and related contemporary practices) based on three "use of previous knowledge"-indicators, and risk-avoidant funding structures may have "toward incremental science and away from exploratory projects that are more likely to fail". The study that introduced the "CD index" suggests the overall number of papers has risen while the total of "highly disruptive" papers as measured by the index hasn't (notably, the 1998 discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe has a CD index of 0). Their results also suggest scientists and inventors "may be struggling to keep up with the pace of knowledge expansion".
To address potential anti-novelty bias, researchers have proposed novelty metrics that measure whether a study makes novel combinations of cited journals while accounting for methodological difficulty. Approaches include textual analysis and comparative bibliographic methods." Other approaches include pro-actively funding risky projects. (see above)

=== Topic mapping ===
Science maps could show main interrelated topics within a certain scientific domain, their change over time, and their key actors (researchers, institutions, journals). They may help find factors determine the emergence of new scientific fields and the development of interdisciplinary areas and could be relevant for science policy purposes. (see above) Theories of scientific change could guide "the exploration and interpretation of visualized intellectual structures and dynamic patterns". The maps can show the intellectual, social or conceptual structure of a research field. Beyond visual maps, expert survey-based studies and similar approaches could identify understudied or neglected societally important areas, topic-level problems (such as stigma or dogma), or potential misprioritizations. Examples of such are studies about policy in relation to public health and the social science of climate change mitigation where it has been estimated that only 0.12% of all funding for climate-related research is spent on such despite the most urgent puzzle at the current juncture being working out how to mitigate climate change, whereas the natural science of climate change is already well established.
There are also studies that map a scientific field or a topic such as the study of the use of research evidence in policy and practice, partly using surveys.

=== Controversies, current debates and disagreement ===