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. 2020 Aug 28;10:14232. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-71009-7

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© The Author(s) 2020

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Popularity of fields and scientists’ degree of diversification/specialization. (a) Circular bar-chart showing the number of articles assigned to each sub-field in the one-digit PACS codes, taking into account their hierarchical structure. The chart highlights the popularity of Condensed Matter research in both size and scope. (b) Distribution of scientists’ degree of diversification (the number of sub-field they explored; orange bars) and of their relative specialization (the number of sub-fields in which they have a scientific advantage; red dots). Scientists explore several sub-fields, but specialize in only a few—despite the existence of some individuals with a truly interdisciplinary path, by and large research portfolios are fairly limited in scope. Inset: pictorial description of a scientist who explored three sub-fields (orange) but has only one specialization (PACS 05: red).