The social dimension of the chemical space

Following up on previous detailed studies on the chemical space, we preset a thorough analysis of a large bibliographic data set for the publications where new chemical substances and reactions were reported in the scientific literature during the period 1840-2021. From it, we unveil a plethora of details on the dynamics and structure of the interactions in the community of chemists dedicated to the discovery of new substances. In particular, we provide a simple model of growth of the community as a linear birth-death process, that successfully explains one of the main global features observed in the data: The sustained exponential growth of discovery of new chemical substances. We go into further detail on the structure of the community by reconstructing the collaboration networks and their statistical properties.