On the challenges ahead of spatial scientometrics focusing on the city level

Abstract

Since the mid-1970s, it has become highly acknowledged to measure and evaluate changes in international research collaborations and the scientific performance of institutions and countries through the prism of bibliometric and scientometric data. Spatial bibliometrics and scientometrics (henceforward spatial scientometrics) have traditionally focused on examining both country and regional levels; however, in recent years, numerous spatial analyses on the city level have been carried out. While citylevel scientometric analyses have gained popularity among policymakers and statistical/economic research organizations, researchers in the field of bibliometrics are divided regarding whether it is possible to observe the spatial unit 'city' through bibliometric and scientometric tools. After systematically scrutinizing relevant studies in the field, three major problems have been identified: 1) there is no standardized method of how cities should be defined and how metropolitan areas should be delineated, 2) there is no standardized method of how bibliometric and scientometric data on the city level should be collected and processed and 3) it is not clearly defined how cities can profit from the results of bibliometric and scientometric analysis focusing on them. This paper investigates major challenges ahead of spatial scientometrics, focusing on the city level and presents some possible solutions.

Geographies of the global co-editor network in oncology

“…The delineation methodology of metropolitan areas to increase the comparability of the data was crucial. In spatial scientometrics, different methods are employed to merge localities into larger spatial units [ 25 ]. Some researchers developed case-specific delineation methods and created metropolitan areas exclusively for analytical purposes [ 26 – 31 ], whereas other researchers used already-existing metropolitan area classifications developed by national and international organizations [ 32 – 35 ].…”

Evolution of the World Stage of Global Science from a Scientific City Network Perspective

“…Csomós [9] discussed the various challenges of spatial scientometrics focusing on the city level. One of these challenges is that there exists no consensus in the literature on how the spatial unit "city" should be defined and how metropolitan areas should be delineated.…”

“…In this work, we consider rankings at the city level. However, there exists no consensus in the literature on how the spatial unit "city" should be defined [9]. Therefore, we propose a new approach to delineate scientific cities, agglomerations of cities within a small radius based on geo-located addresses on scientific publications.…”

Exploring the changing geographical pattern of international scientific collaborations through the prism of cities

“…The publication history of these selected cities was investigated in the periods of 1994 −1996 and 2004−2006 as well. Naturally, one of the major problems of spatial scientometric analysis focusing on the city level is that it is rather challenging to delineate cities according to the same spatial standards [55]. For example, in urban geography, the name "Tokyo" can correspond to both the Tokyo Metropolis with an area of 2,200 square kilometers and a population of 14 million and the Tokyo Major Metropolitan Area covering 32,700 square kilometers and containing 36.3 million people (i.e., they may produce highly different publication outputs).…”

“…However, scientific interaction between cities has been analyzed by only a few papers [32,53,54], primarily due to the problems of data collection and processing [55].…”