https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-023-00418-1
Regular Article
The concept of decentralization through time and disciplines: a quantitative exploration
1
School of Mathematical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, E1 4NS, London, United Kingdom
2
CNRS, GEMASS, 59 rue Pouchet, F-75017, Paris, France
3
Sony Computer Science Laboratories Rome, Joint Initiative CREF-Sony, Centro Ricerche Enrico Fermi, Via Panisperna 89/A, I-00184, Rome, Italy
4
Department of Mathematics, City, University of London, Northampton Square, EC1V 0HB, London, United Kingdom
5
Complexity Science Hub Vienna, Josefstädter Str. 39, A-1080, Vienna, Austria
6
Dipartimento di Fisica ed Astronomia, Università di Catania and INFN, Via S. Sofia, 64, I-95123, Catania, Italy
7
The Alan Turing Institute, British Library, 96 Euston Road, NW1 2DB, London, United Kingdom
8
UCL Centre for Blockchain Technologies, University College London, Malet Place, WC1E 6BT, London, United Kingdom
Received:
10
March
2023
Accepted:
18
September
2023
Published online:
3
October
2023
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 
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.
Key words: Decentralisation / Science of science / Interdisciplinary / Knowledge flows / Complex networks
Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-023-00418-1.
Gabriele Di Bona and Alberto Bracci contributed equally to this work.
© The Author(s) 2023
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