Nature releases peer review files in battle over declining scientific disruption
Pseudomanifold · x · 2026-09-19
Russell Funk's team revealed that, at their request, Nature has released the full peer review files for Holst et al.'s Comment and their Reply on the decline in scientific disruptiveness — the Comment's reviews were never shared with them during review.
Key points from the Reply:
- Using Holst et al.'s own dataset, metric and method, they still find declines equivalent to benchmark transformations in science;
- Holst et al.'s own regression model, designed to address zero-reference concerns, yields large significant declines for both papers and patents (P < 0.01) — a result in their supplementary tables that contradicts their central claim;
- The critique data contain three times as many zero-reference works, indicating severe quality issues.
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