The concept of decentralization through time and disciplines: a quantitative exploration

EPJ Data Science

Regular Article

Alberto Bracci¹  Andrea Baronchelli²  Nicola Perra³  Gabriele Di Bona⁴  Vito Latora⁵ 

[1] Department of Mathematics, City, University of London, Northampton Square, EC1V 0HB, London, United Kingdom;Department of Mathematics, City, University of London, Northampton Square, EC1V 0HB, London, United Kingdom;The Alan Turing Institute, British Library, 96 Euston Road, NW1 2DB, London, United Kingdom;UCL Centre for Blockchain Technologies, University College London, Malet Place, WC1E 6BT, London, United Kingdom;School of Mathematical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, E1 4NS, London, United Kingdom;School of Mathematical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, E1 4NS, London, United Kingdom;CNRS, GEMASS, 59 rue Pouchet, F-75017, Paris, France;Sony Computer Science Laboratories Rome, Joint Initiative CREF-Sony, Centro Ricerche Enrico Fermi, Via Panisperna 89/A, I-00184, Rome, Italy;School of Mathematical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, E1 4NS, London, United Kingdom;Complexity Science Hub Vienna, Josefstädter Str. 39, A-1080, Vienna, Austria;Dipartimento di Fisica ed Astronomia, Università di Catania and INFN, Via S. Sofia, 64, I-95123, Catania, Italy;

关键词: Decentralisation;    Science of science;    Interdisciplinary;    Knowledge flows;    Complex networks;   

DOI  :  10.1140/epjds/s13688-023-00418-1

 received in 2023-03-10, accepted in 2023-09-18,  发布年份 2023

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

Decentralization is a pervasive concept found across disciplines, including Economics, Political Science, and Computer Science, where it is used in distinct yet interrelated ways. Here, we develop and publicly release a general pipeline to investigate the scholarly history of the term, analysing 425,144\documentclass[12pt]{minimal}\usepackage{amsmath}\usepackage{wasysym}\usepackage{amsfonts}\usepackage{amssymb}\usepackage{amsbsy}\usepackage{mathrsfs}\usepackage{upgreek}\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt}\begin{document}$425{,}144$\end{document} academic publications that refer to (de)centralization. We find that the fraction of papers on the topic has been exponentially increasing since the 1950s. In 2021, 1 author in 154 mentioned (de)centralization in the title or abstract of an article. Using both semantic information and citation patterns, we cluster papers in fields and characterize the knowledge flows between them. Our analysis reveals that the topic has independently emerged in the different fields, with small cross-disciplinary contamination. Moreover, we show how Blockchain has become the most influential field about 10 years ago, while Governance dominated before the 1990s. In summary, our findings provide a quantitative assessment of the evolution of a key yet elusive concept, which has undergone cycles of rise and fall within different fields. Our pipeline offers a powerful tool to analyze the evolution of any scholarly term in the academic literature, providing insights into the interplay between collective and independent discoveries in science.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE 2023

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