Geography of scientific knowledge: A proximity approach

Abstract

Proximity among scientists in social, cognitive, and physical dimensions promotes the sharing of tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge helps scientists to understand the credibility of papers they read and to use the results in subsequent research. Hence, given the proximity among scientists in social, cognitive, and physical dimensions, one can predict patterns of diffusion in science. However, for controversial knowledge claims to become replicated, one expects the proximity between scientists itself to change as like-minded scientists relocate and create new coalitions. Proximity can thus be used as a unifying concept for the study of scientific knowledge diffusion as well as for the analysis of mobility of scientists.

The geography of scientific citations

“…To be able to judge the relevance of knowledge introduced in a scientific article, knowledge relatedness seems to be by far the most important factor (Breschi and Lissoni, 2009). In relation to scientific articles, knowledge relatedness can be understood to mean the extent to which the reader of the article has the necessary knowledge to de-code the codified knowledge stored in the article and to actively use it when developing new knowledge (Breschi et al, 2003;Frenken, 2010). Only when knowledge relatedness is sufficiently high, the reader will be able to use the knowledge as input in the production of new knowledge.…”

The formation of economic networks: a proximity approach

“…Thus, external knowledge is more easily evaluated, but also more easily combined and integrated into the internal knowledge. As noted by Frenken (2010), cognitive proximity is certainly the most important dimension observed by organizations when they select their future partners. That is, their own cognitive base should be close enough to the new knowledge in order to communicate, understand and process it successfully.…”

Quoka Atlas of Scholarly Knowledge Production: An Interactive Sensemaking Tool for Exploring the Outputs of Research Institutions

“…One example of this is the clear shift in 2004 away from "humanities computing" to "digital humanities" [Hockey, 2004, Vanhoutte, 2013. The role of geography in the development of research and innovation has also been extensively studied [Saxenian, 1996, Jöns and Hoyler, 2013, Frenken, 2020.…”