Generalization and the Rise of System-level Creativity in Science

Scientific progress has long been understood as recombinant, with breakthroughs arising when existing ideas are joined in new ways. Empirical work in this tradition has focused on the inputs to discovery, asking whether a paper draws together atypical or distant prior knowledge. Far less is known about how knowledge is supplied for downstream recombination, or how individual contributions are forged to play distinct and distant roles in the broader system of science. Using citation networks from tens of millions of publications in OpenAlex and the Web of Science, here we show that scientific contributions stably decompose into three functional types, foundations, extensions, and generalizations, distinguishable by the local structure of their forward citations. This decomposition of the 'functional role' of scientific work presents an unseen pattern of scientific production: foundational and extensional work, which respectively build and elaborate within disciplines, dominated the post-war decades but has declined steadily since the early 1990s, while generalizations, meaning compressed and modular contributions reused in distant fields, have risen sharply. Stacked difference-in-differences analyses that exploit venues' transitions to online access and authors' adoption of large language models provide causal evidence that digital knowledge infrastructure is driving this shift. The locus of innovation has thus migrated from within what Simon might characterize as nearly decomposable disciplinary modules to the interfaces between them, recasting the much-discussed decline of disruption as a structural reorganization of science rather than a slowdown, and revealing a growing misalignment between how science now advances and how it is recognized and rewarded.