This is Nature's publication record.
150 years of interconnected research represented by the majority of Nature's papers.
A snapshot of the ever growing web of collaboration and discovery that is science.
Each dot is a paper.
The colour represents the field – yellow for Earth and space science,
green for physics, and so on.
Two papers are connected if a third references them both.
Using these simple rules, scientists built the network paper by paper.
Let's start from the beginning, 1869.
These are the early days of science publishing.
Back then, papers didn't exist as they do today.
Rather, they took the form of correspondence, popping up sporadically.
But over time, things change.
They start to cluster together into disciplines – communities emerge.
In 1986, the discovery of high-temperature superconductors
leads to a blossoming of similar papers in Nature, shown here in green.
It was a field which would continue to grow throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Back to the 1930s now.
The two World Wars lead to an increase in nuclear physics research
as nations race to split the atom.
And this too is reflected in Nature's publication record,
as nuclear physics papers cluster together in the 30s and 40s.
And there – that's a paper putting forward a concept in genetics called canalisation.
It was published in 1942, but remained largely uncited for decades –
that is, until the late 90s when new discoveries led to it finding new relevance.
Each paper takes its place in this network of Nature, but that's just the beginning.
Every discovery is built on the work which precedes it and then in turn
forms the foundations of the discoveries of the future, and we can see that too.
Let's take Watson and Crick's seminal paper on the structure of DNA as an example.
Here it is.
Below it is every paper that it referenced, not just Nature papers, every paper.
Then every paper that those papers referenced and so on.
Above it is all the papers that built their work based on Watson and Crick's discovery.
At the centre are the most highly cited papers, orbited by those with fewer connections.
By looking from either end, we can see the fields cluster together.
Let's look at the papers referenced by Watson and Crick.
As well as biomedical science, there are contributions from other fields.
Chemistry and physics feed into the discovery of the double helix.
After publication, the picture looks somewhat different.
The structure of DNA formed a springboard for engineering and technology research.
There are clusters of mathematics papers, even studies from the humanities and social sciences.
Every paper has its own story, its own unique network
and each of those networks connects to others to form a whole.
Every paper in every field playing their part in the global process of research and discovery.
Over 150 years, Nature too has played its own small part,
contributing its publication record to the great, interconnected network of science.