A Century of Science: Globalization of Scientific Collaborations, Citations, and Innovations

TL;DR

This paper analyzes a century of scientific progress, highlighting the rise of collaboration, globalization, and shifts in citation patterns, revealing how science has evolved into a more interconnected and international enterprise.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of 89 million papers from 1900 to 2015, uncovering trends in collaboration, citation behavior, and globalization of science over the past century.

Findings

Over 90% of innovations now stem from collaborations, up from less than 25% in 1900.

International collaborations increased 25-fold, citations 7-fold, indicating growing globalization.

The US, UK, and Germany's share of citations declined from 95% to 50%.

Abstract

Progress in science has advanced the development of human society across history, with dramatic revolutions shaped by information theory, genetic cloning, and artificial intelligence, among the many scientific achievements produced in the 20th century. However, the way that science advances itself is much less well-understood. In this work, we study the evolution of scientific development over the past century by presenting an anatomy of 89 million digitalized papers published between 1900 and 2015. We find that science has benefited from the shift from individual work to collaborative effort, with over 90% of the world-leading innovations generated by collaborations in this century, nearly four times higher than they were in the 1900s. We discover that rather than the frequent myopic- and self-referencing that was common in the early 20th century, modern scientists instead tend to look for literature further back and farther around. Finally, we also observe the globalization of scientific development from 1900 to 2015, including 25-fold and 7-fold increases in international collaborations and citations, respectively, as well as a dramatic decline in the dominant accumulation of citations by the US, the UK, and Germany, from ~95% to ~50% over the same period. Our discoveries are meant to serve as a starter for exploring the visionary ways in which science has developed throughout the past century, generating insight into and an impact upon the current scientific innovations and funding policies.