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

Published: 13 August 2017 Publication History

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.

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cover image ACM Conferences
KDD '17: Proceedings of the 23rd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
August 2017
2240 pages
ISBN:9781450348874
DOI:10.1145/3097983
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 13 August 2017

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Author Tags

  1. big data
  2. diversity in science
  3. funding policy
  4. microsoft academic graph
  5. science of science
  6. scientific impact

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KDD '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 64 of 748 submissions, 9%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,133 of 8,635 submissions, 13%

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  • (2024)Characterizing structure of cross-disciplinary impact of global disciplines: A perspective of the Hierarchy of ScienceJournal of Data and Information Science10.2478/jdis-2024-00089:1(53-81)Online publication date: 6-Feb-2024
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  • (2023)Consistency pays off in scienceQuantitative Science Studies10.1162/qss_a_002524:2(491-500)Online publication date: 1-May-2023
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