The global geography of scientific visibility: a deconcentration process (1999–2011)

Abstract

This article aims to ascertain whether the territorial redistribution observed in the geography of scientific production between 1999 and 2008 translated into a redistribution of the geography of citations, and therefore of scientific visibility. Are publications from formerly marginal locations able to influence researchers based in ''central locations'', or is their impact mostly ''provincial''? Because the distribution of citations is extremely asymmetrical, it could very well be that the geographic de-concentration of production activities did not lead to the geographic de-concentration of citations, but instead contributed to creating increasingly asymmetrical flows of information for the benefit of ''central'' cities and countries. This article aims to verify whether this is the case by analysing the geographic distribution of citations received, using a method for localising the publications indexed in the Web of Science by urban areas. Results show a growing convergence between the geography of scientific production and that of scientific citations. The number of citations received by the world's 30 top publishing countries and cities tended to edge closer to the global average. While Singapore, China, India and Iran suffered from a deficit of visibility in 2000, their level considerably improved by 2007. Moreover, a decrease in the discrepancy between cities' scientific visibility is observed in almost all countries of the world, except for three: Sweden, Egypt and Denmark. To finish, our results show that the gap between the share of citations and the share of publications has decreased across all disciplines. A significant asymmetry in favour of Englishspeaking countries has remained in the distribution of citations in humanities and social sciences (but it is diminishing).

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

“…Scientometric studies focusing on the city level respond to the above-described problem generated by the non-standardized delineation method of metropolitan areas in two ways: one part of such studies ignores delineating metropolitan areas and considers settlements as autonomous territorial entities, while another part of them focuses on already existing metropolitan areas or creates metropolitan areas exclusively for analytical purposes (Table 1). In a set of papers, Maisonobe et al (2016Maisonobe et al ( , 2017Maisonobe et al ( , 2018b, and in a previous study, Grossetti et al (2014), created urban agglomerations exclusively to analyze publication characteristics. In these studies, the delineation of large metropolitan areas is based on population density data; furthermore, a distance threshold of 40 km is used for merging smaller urban entities.…”

“…Bornmann and de Moya-Anegón (2019) detect hot and cold spots in the United States based on bibliomteric data produced by institutions.  Maisonobe et al (2016Maisonobe et al ( , 2017 investigate cities' publication output and collaboration network from different aspects while Grossetti et al (2014) examine the global and national deconcentration of scientific activities through the prism of cities.  Csomós and Tóth (2016) explore the spatial distribution of scientific publications created by multinational corporations from two geographical approaches.…”

Factors Influencing Cities’ Publishing Efficiency

“…In the past decades, the publication output of China has radically increased, and the growth rate has exceeded that of any other countries in the world. Furthermore, the publication outputs of some emerging countries, such as South Korea, Taiwan, India, and Iran, have also significantly increased (Csomós 2018;Grossetti et al 2014;Maisonobe et al 2017). Naturally, the annual outputs of the United States, Canada, the Western European countries, and Japan have also increased, but they have witnessed a much smaller growth rate than the emerging countries.…”

“…However, many researchers wonder about the quality of publications produced in Brazilian, Chinese, Indian, Iranian, and even South Korean cities, which is also reflected in their low citation impact (Andersson et al 2014;Maisonobe et al 2017;Xie et al 2014;Van Noorden 2010;Zhou et al 2009a). In the period from 2014 to 2016, the greatest number of highly cited articles were produced in Beijing (see Table 2), which is not surprising, if we consider the extremely high total publication…”

“…Some cities in the world have long been considered as an outstanding locus of the production of science (Matthiessen and Schwarz 1999;Van Noorden 2010), and for some decades, an increasing number of cities have been involved in that process (Grossetti et al 2014;Maisonobe et al 2017). However, cities' contribution to the global publication output has been changing over time.…”