Globalization and Glassy Ideality of the Web of Twentieth Century Science

TL;DR

This paper introduces a glass model for scientific communication based on a large scientometric dataset, revealing a universal structure in scientific development that changed qualitatively around 1960 due to globalization effects.

Contribution

It presents a parameter-free glass model explaining the internal structure of scientific research and its transformation in the 20th century caused by globalization.

Findings

Universal internal structure in scientific development across natural sciences

Qualitative change in scientific communication patterns around 1960

Globalization effects modeled as anomalous superdiffusion, enhancing diffusion by up to 100 times

Abstract

Scientific communication is an essential part of modern science: whereas Archimedes worked alone, Newton (correspondence with Hooke, 1676) acknowledged that "If I have seen a little further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." How is scientific communication reflected in the patterns of citations in scientific papers? How have these patterns changed in the 20th century, as both means of communication and individual transportation changed rapidly, compared to the earlier post-Newton 18th and 19th centuries? Here we discuss a glass model for scientific communications, based on a unique 2009 scientometric study of 25 million papers and 600 million citations that encapsulates the epistemology of modern science. The glass model predicts and explains, using no adjustable parameters, a surprisingly universal internal structure in the development of scientific research, which is essentially constant across the natural sciences, but which because of globalization changed qualitatively around 1960. Globalization corresponds physically to anomalous superdiffusion, which has been observed near the molecular glass transition, and can enhance molecular diffusion by factors as large as 100.