Yeah. It's going to take a lot of diplomacy. What you want to do is get all the other civs to do a lot of the researching. You play the Science Broker strategy, and keep all the other civs relatively up-to-date in everything. See if you can manipulate the other civs to maximize their science spending.
If you can guess which advances the other civs are going to work on next, you may be able to avoid doubling up and wasting research resources.
The opposite strategy, which cripples research funding for the other civs, is to sell them stuff at high per-turn prices, forcing them to crank up the tax rate. You want to avoid this, so consider selling them stuff for lump sum cash, or just giving it to them free. Any civ that forces you to wipe them out early will be useless in research for the rest of the game, so avoid war if you can.
To maximize your own science production, it might help to make a "Huge Science City". This city has to be close to your palace, and should have lots of commerce bonus terrain. See how many of the Science buildings and wonders you can get in the same city. If you can build Colossus, Copernicus' Observatory, Newton's University, and the SETI Program, you should have it made.
Also try to switch to Republic early in the game.
Corruption is a big problem with science research. Anything close to you palace or forbidden palace will benefit from libraries, universities, and research labs. Anything far away you may as well just write off.
