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 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.

翻译：去中心化是一个横跨经济学、政治学和计算机科学等多个学科的普遍概念，在不同学科中有着独特却又相互关联的用法。在此，我们开发并公开发布了一套通用分析流程，用以探究该术语的学术历史，分析了425,144篇提及（去）中心化的学术出版物。我们发现，自20世纪50年代以来，涉及该主题的论文占比呈指数级增长。2021年，每154位作者中就有1位在文章的标题或摘要中提及（去）中心化。结合语义信息和引用模式，我们将论文按学科领域进行聚类，并刻画了它们之间的知识流动。我们的分析表明，该主题在不同学科中独立兴起，跨学科渗透程度较低。此外，我们展示了区块链如何在大约10年前成为最具影响力的领域，而治理则在20世纪90年代前占据主导地位。总的来说，我们的发现为这一关键却难以捉摸的概念的演变提供了量化评估，该概念在不同学科中经历了兴衰周期。我们的分析流程为分析学术文献中任何学术术语的演变提供了有力工具，有助于洞悉科学领域集体发现与独立发现之间的相互作用。