Social Science is Withering

In the past five years social science has dwindled. Physical science has not. Would it be so bad if social science died?

Image by Author, via MidJourney

The Dwindling of the Social Sciences (In One Cool Graph!)

Earlier this week, while fiddling with Web of Science, I stumbled across surprising evidence suggesting that social science output is plummeting. To show you, I’ve put together a graph of publication volume (i.e. number of publications per year) for nine academic fields — five physical sciences and four social sciences.

The fields vary in output, so I converted them to percentages, with the 100% mark for each field set at its publication volume in 2019. For context, the decades before 2019 were marked by explosive growth in science productivity for all fields, so even with the decline shown here the social sciences are more productive than they were in, say, 2005.

But something is changing.

Are the Social Sciences Really Dying?

First, this is unlikely to be a simple Covid suppression effect since physical sciences grew during the same time frame. It also can’t be written off as a function of conservative American politics, since this all happened during Biden’s tenure.

It is possible that this reflects a broader global conservative shift since many articles indexed by the Web of Science database (which the raw counts of publication volume were drawn from) come from other countries as well. But, regardless, a quick bounce-back is unlikely: Trump is openly hostile to the egghead crowd and this downward trend is likely to intensify. I think we should ask questions, then, about where this is going and what is likely to happen.

I suppose we should also note that social science isn’t in imminent danger of collapsing and dying (at least, I don’t think it is). Productivity in social science has been decreasing for several years, but as I mentioned, prior to 2019 it had been growing for decades. A better way to say it, then…