  Science is considered essential to innovation and economic prosperity.
Understanding how nations build scientific capacity is therefore crucial to
promote economic growth and national development. Although studies have shown
that national scientific development is affected by geographic, historic, and
economic factors, it remains unclear whether there are universal structures and
trajectories behind national scientific development that can inform forecasting
and policy making. By examining countries' scientific exportation-the
publications that are internationally indexed-we reveal a three-cluster
structure in the relatedness network of disciplines that underpin national
scientific development and the organization of global science. Tracing the
evolution of national research portfolios reveals that while nations are
proceeding to more diverse research profiles individually, scientific
production is increasingly specialized in global science over the past decades.
We further demonstrate that the revealed disciplinary clusters inform economic
development, where the number of publications in applied research centered
cluster significantly predicts economic growth. By uncovering the underlying
structure of scientific development and connecting it with economic
development, our results may offer a new perspective to study national
scientific development and its relationships with economic development.
