Quantifying the Diaspora of Knowledge in the Last Century

TL;DR

This paper maps the flow of research interests over the past century, revealing how knowledge dispersed across disciplines and identifying key periods and topics that drove these movements, linked to historical events.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive, data-driven analysis of the evolution of research interests and the diaspora of knowledge across scientific disciplines over a hundred years.

Findings

Medicine, Physics, Chemistry act as sources of knowledge diaspora.

Material Science, Neuroscience, Environmental Science are major sinks.

Significant shifts in research interests correlate with historical and political events.

Abstract

Academic research is driven by several factors causing different disciplines to act as "sources" or "sinks" of knowledge. However, how the flow of authors' research interests -- a proxy of human knowledge -- evolved across time is still poorly understood. Here, we build a comprehensive map of such flows across one century, revealing fundamental periods in the raise of interest in areas of human knowledge. We identify and quantify the most attractive topics over time, when a relatively significant number of researchers moved from their original area to another one, causing what we call a "diaspora of the knowledge" towards sinks of scientific interest, and we relate these points to crucial historical and political events. Noticeably, only a few areas -- like Medicine, Physics or Chemistry -- mainly act as sources of the diaspora, whereas areas like Material Science, Chemical Engineering, Neuroscience, Immunology and Microbiology or Environmental Science behave like sinks.