  A recent highly-publicized study by Park et al. (Nature 613: 138-144, 2023),
claiming that science has become less disruptive over recent decades,
represents an extraordinary achievement but with deceptive results. The measure
of disruption, CD-5, in this study does not account for differences in citation
amid decades of exponential growth in publication rate. In order to account for
both the exponential growth as well as the differential impact of research
works over time, here we apply a weighted disruption index to the same dataset.
We find that, among research papers in the dataset, this weighted disruption
index has been close to its expected neutral value over the last fifty years
and has even increased modestly since 2000. We also show how the proportional
decrease in unique words (highlighted by Park et al. (2023) is expected in an
exponentially growing corpus. Finding little evidence for recent decrease in
disruption, we suggest that it is actually increasing.
