Breakthrough Asymmetries across Disciplines and Countries: A Network approach to Structural Complexity of Scientific Progress

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Hauptverfasser: Raghuvanshi, Adarsh, Unni, Hrishidev, Vinayak, Chakraborti, Anirban
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Raghuvanshi, Adarsh
Unni, Hrishidev
Vinayak
Chakraborti, Anirban
author_facet Raghuvanshi, Adarsh
Unni, Hrishidev
Vinayak
Chakraborti, Anirban
contents Science is driven by community endeavors across diverse fields and specializations, forming a complex structure that renders conventional performance evaluation methods inadequate. Using established indicators, the network-based normalized citation score, and the disruptive index, combined with the GENEPY algorithm, we evaluate the complexity rank of countries based on their breakthrough performance across 89 subfields of physical sciences, drawing on nearly 60 million articles (1900-2023). This quality-focused integrated approach reveals pronounced asymmetries: while countries such as the United States, Israel, and several in Europe sustain long-term structural advantages, emerging nations show rapid gains in later decades. A power-law relationship between aggregated breakthrough performance and countries' R&D expenditure underscores the unequal and scale-dependent nature of global science. These results demonstrate that scientific advancement arises not from uniform growth but from asymmetric complexity, offering actionable insights for policymakers and funding agencies aiming to foster sustainable, high-quality research ecosystems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_18804
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Breakthrough Asymmetries across Disciplines and Countries: A Network approach to Structural Complexity of Scientific Progress
Raghuvanshi, Adarsh
Unni, Hrishidev
Vinayak
Chakraborti, Anirban
Digital Libraries
Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
Physics and Society
Science is driven by community endeavors across diverse fields and specializations, forming a complex structure that renders conventional performance evaluation methods inadequate. Using established indicators, the network-based normalized citation score, and the disruptive index, combined with the GENEPY algorithm, we evaluate the complexity rank of countries based on their breakthrough performance across 89 subfields of physical sciences, drawing on nearly 60 million articles (1900-2023). This quality-focused integrated approach reveals pronounced asymmetries: while countries such as the United States, Israel, and several in Europe sustain long-term structural advantages, emerging nations show rapid gains in later decades. A power-law relationship between aggregated breakthrough performance and countries' R&D expenditure underscores the unequal and scale-dependent nature of global science. These results demonstrate that scientific advancement arises not from uniform growth but from asymmetric complexity, offering actionable insights for policymakers and funding agencies aiming to foster sustainable, high-quality research ecosystems.
title Breakthrough Asymmetries across Disciplines and Countries: A Network approach to Structural Complexity of Scientific Progress
topic Digital Libraries
Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
Physics and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18804