  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.
