For Better Innovation, For Better Research,
And Against Forms Of Abuse of Power

The Decline of Scientific Innovation

In a 2024 article titled "The Worrisome Decline in Breakthrough Innovation", published in the platform KNOWLEDGE managed by the ESSEC Business School, Radu Vranceanu proposes a review arguing that multiple studies have highlighted a decrease in scientific productivity of the US since the 1970s. The researcher particularly points at two articles by Chu and Evans (2021) and Park et al. (2023), and at the 2023 article "Are ideas getting harder to find? A short review of the evidence" published by Matt Clancy within the OECD Report "Artificial Intelligence in Science: Challenges, Opportunities and the Future of Research." This, in turn, mentions a preceding study by Boeing and Hünermund (2020) highlighting similar dynamics in Germany and China. The question raised by Clancy is whether less innovative ideas are circulating within the research sector. All these studies suggest that, although this sector has experienced an increase in the number of researchers overall, this increase has not been met with a corresponding growth in the quality of research outputs. In other words, given that the volume of publication is ever increasing, we are publishing more and more but the quality of our research may be decreasing. This decline suggests potential systemic issues within the research environment itself.

The Rise of Academic Misconduct

McCabe et al. (2001) have highlighted how cheating in academia among university students has also increased since the 1970s. In a more recent study, Ali et al. (2021) seem to support that practices such as cheating, plagiarism, and ghost-writing have increased, although they do not identify a specific starting date for this trend. Bretag (2013) suggests that this behavior is not confined to university students, but it extends to established researchers as well. The same increase of research misconduct is confirmed in "The European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity" published by All European Academies (ALLEA) in 2011, mentioning "pressure to publish, commercialisation, greater competition for funds, more opportunities for instance through the internet, evaluation practices, and the current career system for scientists" as potential drivers of these results. Beyond general dishonesty, one unethical issue that is perceived to be substantially affecting science is power abuse, as Gonçalves et al. (2024) highlight how power abuse may be the most cited issue in academia together with fraud and bullying.

The Effects of Power Abuse on Innovation

I argue that power abuse may have detrimental effects on innovation and is potentially an important cause for the highlighted decline of breakthrough innovation. As an example, in the 2019 article "Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?," Azoulay et al. highlight how ideas in line with those of "superstar" scientists (e.g. who received high reputation in their respective fields) tend to find higher publication rates as long as those superstars are alive. Contrarily, ideas that are not in line with those ideas, tend to experience a block in publication while those superstars are alive, which is followed by a substantial rise in publication after their deaths. This suggests that the position and influence of those superstar scientists may, voluntarily or involuntarily, stifle innovation that deviated from their thoughts.

In addition to this subtle stifling, power abuse may manifest directly, causing harm to careers. Power positions within the research industry may often stifle innovation, and the perpetrator may often remain unaccountable, raising questions about the accountability of people at the top of the research industry.

For example, as part of my 2025 whistleblowing initiative originally published in the blog pointsofdiscontinuityblog.org, I reported that in 2020 I originally conceived, designed, and wrote a project proposal titled "Points of Discontinuity" building upon a former 2018 publication of mine by the same title, intended for an early-career fellowship by the Austrian Science Fund to promote young scientists and their ideas. Eventually, the prospected mentor became the PI of the project.

As soon as the PI officially received the money and associated authority, my ideas (focused on the notion of entropy, as informing the grant proposal) suddenly became a nonsense, as it was hard in the PI's opinion to understand how those ideas still existed. The PI dishonored our original understanding that I would lead the project and, fundamentally, the promotion of my ideas became unimportant, asking me to dedicate less time to my ideas and more to the project he was now leading. Eventually, those ideas were later published in an international journal and officially praised for their level of innovation.

A similar example highlighting how abuse of power may stifle innovation occurred to me during a project submission to Creative Europe in 2021. The project was rejected due to a factual error by one peer-reviewer, who deemed the project as not meeting the minimum requirement of the call, which was the integration of the audiovisual sector within the product concept. The comment of the peer-reviewer stated that the integration of the audiovisual sector was not demonstrated, identifying it as a critical flaw.

I reported the factual error, which is considered by the European Union as a valid reason for complaints, and the officer of the EACEA denied a redress through the use of a double negative. To deny the presence of a factual error, the EACEA officer argued that nowhere it was written that the audiovisual sector was not-integrated, but simply that its integration was not demonstrated. I eventually requested the release of my files under the EU regulation 1049/2001 and published an investigation into the incident with all relevant evidence in this Zenodo repository, showing how multiple stages of the complaint process showed a pattern to fail addressing and responding to the core argumentation of my complaint, questioning whether this may be a systemic issue.

The case is interesting because the European Union defines the rejection of project proposals through inadequate reasoning as an abuse of power, and the rejected project was previously acknowledged as a top innovation by multiple initiatives like the Horizon-2020 CLIC Startup Competition (top-9 international projects), the Italian Alliance for Sustainable Development (Innovability School, top-14 Italian projects in all sectors), and the Startup Europe Accelerathon (top-4 European projects in the Cultural & Creative Industries), which is an initiative created by the European Commission itself to identify the best projects that support Europe's priority goals. 

The question emerging out of these examples is not whether there may or may not be good ideas out there, but whether the abuse of one's power may actually stifle those ideas in various conscious and unconscious ways, either in the forms of peer-review or management style, and what would be the collective price of such a practice. A number of organizations should be devoted to monitor that the rights of researchers and our quest for innovation are treated fairly to prevent this observed decline, but it is a question whether these organizations are effective.

For example, in the former case, I reported the instance of power abuse I experienced within the EU call for projects to the European Ombudsman, an organization especially dedicated to investigate cases of power abuse by EU institutions, and they declined to open an investigation for an unclear generic reason, mentioning that there were "no grounds" to open an investigation, but without highlighting which grounds were missing.

Similarly, when I reported the problem I experienced with the PI to the Austrian Science Fund and the Austrian Agency for Scientific Integrity, part of the evidence informing my allegations could not be considered because of data protection regulations, questioning what would be the purpose of collecting evidence within a whistleblowing framework if such evidence would then not be accounted for.

Conclusions

Given that academic misconduct is arguably on the rise, it is still unrecognized how power abuse and dishonest behavior actually impact scientific productivity and the future of the research sector as a whole, resulting in an arguable systemic issue that stifles innovation and demotivates researchers, remaining often unaddressed. In a 2020 article titled "Academic Dishonesty and Research Productivity in a Changing Higher Education Environment. The Case of India’s Engineering Institutions," Bakthavatchaalam et al. highlight that these forms of dishonesty have the effect of demotivating future early career researchers. Experiencing an environment where corruption and misconduct is often unaddressed may push future researchers to engage more with these types of behavior, having a direct negative impact on our scientific productivity and eventually lowering the quality of the research staff over time.

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References

Ali, I., Sultana, P., & Aboelmaged, M. (2021). A bibliometric analysis of academic misconduct research in higher education: Current status and future research opportunities. Accountability in Research, 28(6), 372–393.

All European Academies (ALLEA). (2011). The European code of conduct for research integrity.

Azoulay, P., Fons-Rosen, C., & Zivin, J. S. G. (2019). Does science advance one funeral at a time? The American Economic Review, 109(8), 2889–2920.

Bakthavatchaalam, V., Miles, M., Machado-Taylor, M. de L., & Sa, M. J. (2021). Academic dishonesty and research productivity in a changing Higher Education environment: The case of India's engineering institutions. Voprosy Obrazovaniya / Educational Studies Moscow, (2), 126–151.

Boeing, P., & Hünermund, P. (2023). Is there a slowdown in research productivity? Evidence from China and Germany. In Artificial intelligence in science: Challenges, opportunities and the future of research. OECD Publishing.

Bretag, T. (2013). Challenges in addressing plagiarism in education. PLoS Medicine, 10(12), e1001574.

Chu, J. S. G., & Evans, J. A. (2021). Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(41), e2021636118.

Clancy, M. (2023). Are ideas getting harder to find? A short review of the evidence. In Artificial intelligence in science: Challenges, opportunities and the future of research. OECD Publishing.

Danieli, L. (2018). Points of discontinuity and spatial cadences: Two experimental concepts for the development of musical theory. In Proceedings of the XXII Colloquio Informatica Musicale (pp. 70–76).

Danieli, L. (2025a, April). About Me. pointsofdiscontinuityblog.org. https://www.pointsofdiscontinuityblog.org/

Danieli, L. (2025b). Evidence of abuse of power during a complaint process related to a EU call for projects. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17225804

Devaney, J., & Meredith, D. (2022). Editorial. Journal of New Music Research, 51(4–5), 259–261.

Gonçalves, F. V., Lourenço, S. S., Alegria, S. C., McCashin, D., & Sampaio, R. (2024). Analysis of whistleblowing in academia. Brazilian Journal of Forensic Sciences, Medical Law and Bioethics, 12(3), 274–290.

McCabe, D. L., Treviño, L. K., & Butterfield, K. D. (2001). Cheating in academic institutions: A decade of research. Ethics & Behavior, 11(3), 219–232.

Park, M., Leahey, E., & Funk, R. J. (2023). Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time. Nature, 613(7942), 138–144.

Vranceanu, R. (2024, February 19). The worrisome decline in breakthrough innovation. KNOWLEDGE, Essec Business School. https://knowledge.essec.edu/en/innovation/the-worrisome-decline-in-breakthrough-innovation.html