  Despite tremendous growth in the volume of new scientific and technological
knowledge, the popular press has recently raised concerns that disruptive
innovative activity is slowing. These dire prognoses were mainly driven by Park
et al. (2023), a Nature publication that uses decades of data and millions of
observations coupled with a novel quantitative metric (the CD index) that
characterizes innovation in science and technology as either consolidating or
disruptive. We challenge the Park et al. (2023) methodology and findings,
principally around concerns of truncation bias and exclusion bias. We show that
88 percent of the decrease in disruptive patents over 1980-2010 reported by the
authors can be explained by their truncation of all backward citations before
1976. We also show that this truncation bias varies by technology class. We
update the analysis to 2016 and account for a change in U.S. patent law that
allows for citations to patent applications in addition to patent grants, which
is ignored by the authors in their analysis. We show that the number of highly
disruptive patents has increased since 1980 -- particularly in IT technologies.
Our results suggest caution in using the Park et al. (2023) methodology as a
basis for research and decision making in public policy, industry restructuring
or firm reorganization aimed at altering the current innovation landscape.
