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