25 YEARS OF CONSTRUCTAL THINKING: HOW GLOBAL DISSEMINATION HAS GROWN FROM A SINGLE TREE TO A NETWORK OF TREES

The Constructal Law has recently passed its 25th anniversary. At the 2023 Constructal Law Conference in Turin, we have looked back, presenting insights on how knowledge of the Constructal Law has spread globally. Here, we expand on our earlier article. Since our initial study, we have seen a daily average of three new publications that mention the term “constructal” in the Scopus database. In parallel, the number of laboratories affiliated with this research has grown from 10,956 to 12,787. Overall, we see a stable annual growth rate exceeding 25 % in our corpus, as well as a global coverage denser than ever. Studying old and new data, we expand on our earlier article not only with new statistics but also with a new insight: the dissemination paths of constructal thinking were initially tree-shaped, but they have presently become a network of overlapping trees. This insight seamlessly aligns with the predictions of the Constructal Law. According to the Constructal Law, trees grow and spread to become forests of trees, which eventually look like networks. This Constructal Law prediction is evidently confirmed in our corpus.