Béatrice Milard

Cities and the geographical deconcentration of scientific activity: A multilevel analysis of publications (1987-2007)

Most current scientific policies incorporate debates on cities and the geographic organisation of scientific activity. Research on ‘world cities’ develops the idea that interconnected agglomerations can better take advantage of international competition. Thus, the increasing concentration of activities in these cities at the expense of others could be observed by certain scholars using measures based on scientific publications. Others, however, show that an opposite trend is emerging: the largest cities are undergoing a relative decline in a country’s scientific activities. To go beyond this seeming contradiction, this paper provides a global analysis of all countries with papers in the Web of Science over the period 1987–2007. The author’s addresses were geocoded and grouped into agglomerations. Registering of papers was based on the fractional counting of multi-authored publications, and the results are unambiguous: deconcentration is the dominant trend both globally and within countries, with some exceptions for which explanations are suggested.

The world network of scientific collaborations between cities: domestic or international dynamics?

An earlier publication (Grossetti et al., 2014) has established that we are attending a decreasing concentration of scientific activities within “world-cities”. Given that more and more cities and countries are contributing to the world production of knowledge, this article analyses the evolution of the world collaboration network both at the domestic and international levels during the 2000s. Using data from the Science Citation Index Expanded, scientific authors’ addresses are geo-localized and grouped by urban areas. Our data suggests that interurban collaborations within countries increased together with international linkages. In most countries, domestic collaborations increased faster than international collaborations. Even among the top collaborating cities, sometimes referred to as “world cities”, the share of domestic collaborations has gained momentum. Our results suggest that, contrary to common beliefs about the globalization process, national systems of research have been strengthening during the 2000s.

La territorialisation des activités scientifiques dans le sud-ouest européen (France, Espagne, Portugal)

The territorialization of scientific activities in the South-West of Europe (France, Spain and Portugal). For more than twenty years, most of european countries are involved in a process og regional decentralization of their higher education systems. This process follows a previous set of universities creations in the sixties years, answering the increase of students number. We examine here three countries of South-West of europe (Spain, France and Portugal) and we link the history of universities creation in different regions and towns and the study of scientific publications. This allow us to evaluate the effects of the territorialization process on the current « scientific map ».

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

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 English-speaking countries has remained in the distribution of citations in humanities and social sciences (but it is diminishing).

Citations in Scientific Texts: Do Social Relations Matter?

This article presents an investigation of the role of social relations in the writing of scientific articles through the study of in‐text citations. Does the fact that the author of an article knows the author whose work he or she cites have an impact on the context of the citation? Because citations are commonly used as criteria for research evaluation, it is important to question their social background to better understand how it impacts textual features. We studied a collection of science articles (N = 123) from 5 disciplines and interviewed their authors (N = 84) to: (a) identify the social relations between citing and cited authors; and (b) measure the correlation between a set of features related to in‐text citations (N = 6,956) and the identified social relations. Our pioneering work, mixing sociological and linguistic results, shows that social relations between authors can partly explain the variations of citations in terms of frequency, position and textual context.

Co-authorship Network Dynamics and Geographical Trajectories - What Part Does Mobility Play?:

The aim of this paper is to investigate the link between geographical mobility and co-authorship formation and dynamics. We propose a methodology based on matching bibliometric data and qualitative data recoded from CVs and semi-structured interviews. The case study of two prolific chemists (authors of 660 publications with 2,596 co-authors) located in the same laboratory shows that the difference in mobility behaviour does not have a strong incidence on the geography of their co-authorship.